


in the blink of an eye

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Paralysis, Permanent Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 14:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14594568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Pidge has a lot of things going for her. She's two years ahead of her own age-group, a tech genius dying to win the upcoming science competition, and maybe a little bit in love with a certain boy in her class. Everything changes when an accident leaves her paralyzed from the neck down.





	in the blink of an eye

**Author's Note:**

> this was commissioned by @wombatking on tumblr !!

“Jesus, Pidge! Do you ever sit still?” Matt griped, picking up his fallen water bottle for the third time. Pidge would’ve apologized for shaking the whole table, but she was too immersed in her work to remember how to form words and speak sentences, much less think of an entire apology. Distantly, she could admit that it was entirely her fault that her brother’s stuff kept falling over, practically everything on the table having shifted around in all her movement, but she still didn’t do anything in an attempt to remedy it.

So what if she bounced her legs and shook the table while she worked? It hardly mattered when the result was something totally spectacular, like this robot would be after she’d completed it. The remote was already done, seeing at that was the easy part. And the robot’s body was tweaked to perfection as well. No, all that was left to be done was calibrate the robot’s command center with the signal level from the remote, and then they’d move in perfect harmony.

It was hard work, finishing this last but vital piece of the machinery, and despite her eyes aching and her fingers becoming almost clumsy in their calibrations, she kept at it, excitement keeping her from quitting before she got to see the end result. She twisted a screw, thumbing a wire into a better placement and pulling another out from under it, about to press it into its end connection and finally test her robot. Her lip was pulled between her teeth, excitement thrumming through her because _surely_  this time everything was right. She’d done the math _again_  and she was so, _so_  sure that this was it, and — _thud_.

Matt’s water bottle, thankfully still closed, once again met its destiny as a water bottle that belonged on its side.

“That’s it,” Matt huffed, pushing his chair back with a loud scraping noise and standing up.

“No, _no_  Matt wait —”

“Uh-uh,” Matt said, shaking his head as he plucked the robot too easily from her hands (curse him! It was some inherent gift of older siblings, Pidge was sure) and setting it aside on the table. “Seriously, you need to get some sleep.”

“You don’t understand how close I am —”

“I understand how _dead_  you look,” Matt scoffed, swatting her hands away when she leaned forward and tried to reach around him, scrambling for her precious invention. “When’s the last time you had something to eat?”

With that, Matt was ushering her to her feet and out of their workshop. It was technically the whole family’s workshop — they were all tinkerers by heart, craving the feeling of metal and gears between their fingers as they invented whatever their heart’s current desire was — but it was definitely the two of them who spent the most time in there. Pidge most of all, really, seeing as Matt was away at college these days anyway.

“I _had_  it…” Pidge muttered under her breath, craning her neck to look back into the room even as the door swung shut behind them. Her mind was still with her invention, her attention scrambling to remember what she’d been doing and thinking, what her fingers had been adjusting and what she’d been planning on connecting. The information began to fizzle out of her mind, surely to be picked back up the next time she was working on her creation, but it was still frustrating nonetheless.

“The competition isn’t for another few months,” Matt pointed out, now steering her into the kitchen. He grabbed a banana and a water bottle and shoved them both in Pidge’s hands. “Keep working when you’re this exhausted and you’ll make some kind of stupid mistake. You’ll calibrate your robot slightly wrong and it’ll do a backflip instead of walking forward.”

“My robot doesn’t have the right parts to do a backflip,” Pidge muttered, but she accepted Matt’s words for truth and continued on to her room anyway. He was right. She couldn’t imagine how humiliated and angered she’d be if she lost the competition because of something she knew better than to do.

Plus, not accidentally ruining her robot aside, there were other reasons why sleep would be a good idea. The fact that she now had to wake up for school in about four hours definitely being one of them.

With a sigh, Pidge collapsed sideways on her bed, still fully dressed and banana half-eaten. She was conked out the second her head hit the pillow.

—

School was, in Pidge’s humble opinion, a complete and utter waste of time created by sadistic capitalists who used its existence to keep kids off the streets and adults in work, all part of some huge, labor-intensive machine built to dredge every last drop of money into the economy; all run on exhaustion, depression, and an inherent need for coffee. This is what she convinced herself, anyway, as she rolled out of bed and into the bathroom, somehow managing to get toothpaste in her hair in her near-dead state. She didn’t have time for a shower, so she rubbed it out as best she could and continued through her minutes-long morning routine.

True to form, she was dressed and munching on a bagel at the front door less than five minutes later, cursing as she always did her past self, who had managed to keep her up horribly late for the millionth night in a row. A car pulled up just as Pidge convinced herself she would nap in physics, and she stumbled out the door and into the passenger seat with no time to spare.

“You look dead,” Keith commented, which wasn’t all that rare nor as insulting as it should be. In response, Pidge slouched in her seat and groaned into her bagel, which Keith deftly picked out of her hand to take a bite of. He immediately made a face. “There isn’t even butter on this,” he stated.

“Too much work.”

“And it’s not even toasted,” Keith said, spitting out the bite of cold un-buttered bagel in disgust. Without anything better to do with the chewed chunk of bread, he rolled down the window and chucked it into the grass.

“Too much work.”

“Pidge, where are you shoes?”

“Too much — wait, what?” Once Pidge had gone back for her shoes, and then back again for her backpack, they were off to school. Keith always picked her up, seeing as he had a car and also a license. Pidge was technically old enough to get her license now, but she’d skipped driver’s ed seeing as she hadn’t exactly been old enough when it’d been offered to her grade in school. She’d skipped two grades back in elementary school, which meant that parents regarded her as a genius and students regarded her as a weirdly younger classmate.

At school, Keith put the car in park and stared at the building before them with resignation. Like Pidge, he was a senior and ready to get the hell out of there. Unlike Pidge, he planned to get out of education and stay out of it.

Classes, as always, were dull and unimpressive. Teachers spoke to them like children yet expected them to act like adults. They handed out busy-work and got frustrated when no one took it seriously. They taught concepts that Pidge had already grasped and assigned homework that Pidge had completed within the first ten minutes of class. Basically, it was a complete waste of her time (no surprise there) and instead of paying attention she applied a better usage to her time, such as tinkering with miniature inventions under the desk or napping as best she could without looking like she was napping.

Come physics, their teacher butchered the formulas and assigned them worksheets, which Pidge immediately put her head on in order to fall asleep. The thing about her physics teacher was that his class could start a riot without him noticing. The second he stopped teaching and sat down in front of his computer, he was gone to the world.

It’d been barely ten minutes, meaning Pidge was in that blissful state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, always harder to reach when she was surrounded by others, when the table jostled slightly under her cheek, pulling her a bit closer to the wakefulness side of things.

“I wish I was like her,” a voice sighed, and immediately Pidge was 100% awake, merely pretending to be asleep, because that was _Lance’s_  voice. Lance wasn’t anything special. Like, he wasn’t one of those super popular kids and he wasn’t on any sports teams, but he was funny and genuine and gorgeous, not that Pidge would ever say any of that out loud.

“How come?” replied Hunk, Pidge’s seat partner. See, her and Hunk and Keith and Lance were _almost_  a friend group. Pidge was best friends with Keith, who was friends with both Hunk and Lance, who were also best friends. And Pidge and Hunk got along great, too. She and Lance knew each other, had definitely talked to each other, but they weren’t _friends_. They just… almost were. It was like there was just one missing connection…

“Because she’s so smart, dude!” Lance whined. “Like, I’m over there struggling to understand why there’s suddenly Greek letters in my equations, and she’s just over here taking a nap. _I_  want a nap.”

“So nap.”

“Ah, but then I’ll fail,” Lance said wisely. Pidge could imagine his expression, could imagine the gestures he was making, and she almost made the mistake of opening her eyes to see if she was right.

“You’re already failing,” Hunk snorted. “A nap can’t hurt.”

“Okay, no need to sound so amused, dude,” Lance said, and the table shifted under his weight as he re-adjusted however he was sitting. “And what did we say about talking about my failing grades?”

“To not do it unless I’m willing to help you cheat your way to success?”

“Exactly,” Lance said happily, a certain self-satisfied smugness to his tone that was just so typically Lance. “So unless you’re willing to let me copy that —”

“Lance.”

“Fine, fine! I’m an A-plus student. No need to copy things.”

Hunk snorted, and that could’ve been that, but a stupid, horrible feeling inside the pit of Pidge’s stomach roared open. It was her stupid crush, she was sure, something that was more of a nuisance than anything else, though she still hadn’t figured out a way to properly douse it. Still, this feeling pounded through her stomach and punched her lungs and wrestled out of her throat and — “I can tutor you,” Pidge said. Her eyes flew open in surprise, matching Lance’s expression exactly, though she quickly smoothed out her own into one of indifference. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be that hard.”

Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat. She wondered if the reverberations were going through the table and into Lance, though Pidge forced herself to calm down and pay attention and stop panicking. There was no way he could feel it through the table. Though what had inspired her to open her fat mouth and utter the stupidest suggestion into existence, the world would never know.

“I thought you were asleep!” Lance said, not answering Pidge’s question and thus dragging on this torture for even longer. _Just give me a response,_  the back of Pidge’s mind chanted. _Just say something. Say no. I don’t care. Just put an end to this!_

“You guys woke me up,” Pidge said, sounding appropriately grumbly and annoyed and wow, maybe she should be an actor. Like, she was good at this. Neither Lance nor Hunk even seemed to notice that she was lying through her teeth and panicking throughout the rest of her body. But then, because Pidge hated herself apparently, she brought it up a second time instead of letting it drift into the non-existence of forgotten statements. “So? You want me to tutor you or what?”

Lance gaped. “I mean — are you serious?”

“You should know what you’re getting into,” Hunk warned, and Lance reached out and kicked Hunk’s hand, easy to accomplish while he was still sitting on the table.

“Don’t scare her off,” Lance protested, a lilt of a whine to his voice. “I need to pass this class.”

“Yeah, but even I couldn’t tutor you,” Hunk pointed out, and Lance threw his head back and groaned.

“That’s because you have no sense of authority,” Lance decided. “I’d say we should give up and play video games and you’d agree. But Pidge over here?” He gestured to her, still looking at Hunk as he talked. “She’s scary. I’d suggest slacking off and she’d like, punch me directly in the face or something.”

Pidge snorted, finally sitting up and rubbing at her eyes. Her glasses were covered in smudges, the bottom all foggy from getting pressed against her cheeks as she’d tried to sleep. “I’m definitely willing to give it a try,” she said, meanwhile her insides were saying something like _oh my God oh my God oh my God._  “I mean, I tutor my cousins sometimes, and that always turns out well.”

“All right, deal!” Lance happily agreed, grinning now. Pidge’s mind was going blissfully blank, some distant part of her acknowledging that, sometime in the near future, she was going to be spending time with Lance. _Alone_. At her _own house_. “When should we get together?”

“Whenever you want,” Pidge said hastily, which definitely sounded way too eager but it wasn’t like she could take it back now. “I mean like, I can’t teach you physics in a day, so it’ll probably be over the course of a few weeks —”

“Awesome,” Lance said, leaning back on his hands happily. “Seriously, I don’t care how long it takes as long as I pass this class. My mom’ll kill me if I get another failing grade…”

And well, that was that. Pidge had _plans_  with her _crush_. Sure, they were tutoring plans, but that didn’t stop the fact that they were plans. And that they’d be spending a lot of time together over the next few weeks. And then, after all that time, they’d probably even be friends.

Waiting for them to actually get together for the study date (something Pidge had started calling it privately in her mind, not that she would ever say this out loud) was agony. They hadn’t planned for the specific date for it to happen, after all, and as the days passed she feared that’d it be one of those plans that never came to fruition, something that was endlessly up in the air and destined to never come back down. She didn’t mention it again even when she saw Lance in physics, afraid she’d sound pushy or weird. And if Lance didn’t bring it up with her then clearly he’d never really wanted to do it in the first place and had just agreed to be polite…

“Hey Pidge, do you think we can meet up tonight?” Lance asked, sliding onto the table in between her and Hunk and looking down at her open notebook. It was filled to the brim with equations, though none of them were the ones they were supposed to be doing in class. Her anxiousness with the whole Lance situation had led her to taking it out otherwise. Which unfortunately meant…

“Pidge, what the hell are you doing?!” Matt had demanded mere nights ago, looking upon the mess and destruction on the table before Pidge with an expression of horror etched into his face. _Yes_ , Pidge had taken apart the robot she’d been working on for a month straight now, the very robot she’d been seconds away from finishing, but it was for a good reason!

With all her anxiety about maybe-maybe-not tutoring Lance, her hands turned fidgety, and any and every gear and wire around her became subject to her whims. She’d very accidentally come up with a robot that was _way cooler_  than the one she’d already built, so it was only logical that she take it apart and construct the newer, better one. Seriously, she’d come up with an idea of how to make it hover using magnetic field technology and was now just itching to complete her robot for the second time.

But Matt had honestly thought she’d been having a mental breakdown, at least, until he’d pestered all the stupid having-a-crush information out of her. And then she’d explained about how awesome her robot was going to be and he lost all interest in Lance, equally thrilled by the idea of her invention. Now, she was once again close to finishing, but with it came the grueling task of conducting about a million equations so she could actually get the damned thing to hover.

All of this Pidge reviewed in her mind in a split second of terror before she actually registered Lance’s words. _Hey Pidge, do you think we can meet up tonight?_

Her stomach fell out of her body. Like, dropped to the floor and stayed there for a moment as her eyes widened, equally in shock over Lance’s words and the now lacking presence of her stomach. She cleared her throat, trying to get her emotions under control.

“Yeah, that sounds good!” she said, and oh God, that’d sounded way too eager, hadn’t it? She had to backtrack quick, by any means possible. She bit her lip, trying to figure out the perfect casual way to pose her body. Maybe changing her tone of voice would make it slightly less obvious? Fuck. She was overthinking it. “You wanna meet at my place?”

“Perfect,” Lance agreed. “I can drive us there, if you want. You usually ride with Keith, right?”

“Right,” Pidge agreed, once again proving what a fantastic actor she was by not choking on the heart that’d decided to crawl up into her throat. Lance shot her a grin paired with finger guns before he was leaning away from her and over Hunk’s paper, looking down at it with a mix of curiosity and disgust.

“Are we supposed to be doing that right now?” Pidge heard him ask, sounding kind of incredulous, but she had to ignore him in favor of pulling out her phone and opening the text message app.

[10:46] Pidge: don’t need a ride home today

She clicked the power button on her phone, slipping it into her pocket. It immediately buzzed, and she pulled it out again.

[10:46] Keith: What do you mean? Are you going to ride the bus or something?

[10:46] Pidge: nah

Keith’s texting bubble popped up immediately, no doubt wanting more explanation than that as to why she suddenly didn’t need a ride home, so she typed out a text and hit send, grinning as his bubble disappeared when she started typing.

[10:46] Pidge: lance is driving me home

She waited smugly, grinning at her phone screen and waiting for Keith’s response. She could feel giggles trying to escape from her throat, a light, lifting sensation in her chest, but she ignored it in favor of not looking crazy when she burst into laughter for seemingly no reason in the middle of class.

[10:47] Keith: ?????

[10:47] Keith: How the fuck did you manage that?

Biting her lip now to attempt to quell her straining smile, she answered.

[10:47] Pidge: i’m tutoring him

[10:47] Pidge: at my house

[10:47] Pidge: and he offered to drive me home :)))

She typed out an extra “HEHEHEHEHE” before deciding that was a little too much and a little too revealing, backspacing it quickly and waiting for Keith’s response with bated breath. He was in his stats class right now, if Pidge was remembering correctly. So like, he should be paying attention, and yet he rarely did.

[10:48] Keith: I can’t help but feel like you somehow orchestrated this whole thing.

[10:48] Keith: But congrats.

Pidge turned off her phone, tucking it back into her sweatshirt pocket and feeling suddenly paranoid. She knew Lance hadn’t seen any of the texts, knew he was still leaning into Hunk and complaining about whatever was inconveniencing him now, but some part of her now felt jittery and anxious at the thought of him having somehow seen them. Or seeing them in the future. She almost went to pull out her phone and delete her texts with Keith before she managed to convince herself she was being too paranoid. Plus, her and Keith had had some pretty funny conversations. She liked to scroll back and read through them sometimes.

Instead, she pulled a few wires and gears out of her backpack. She didn’t actually try to construct them into anything, she just twisted them around and arranged them however she saw fit, the movement of parts and pieces in her hands both familiar and calming.

Yes, she was calm. She was totally not panicking at all at the thought of being alone with Lance later. Her, in Lance’s car, the drive possibly horrible and awkwardly silent. Lance, in her home, looking around her room with interest. Possibly being assaulted by Matt, who was still on break from college and therefore supremely bored. Oh God, she couldn’t let him anywhere _near_  Lance.

“You okay?” Lance suddenly said, popping into her field of vision with a concerned eyebrow raised.

“What? Yeah, how come?”

Lance just pointed at her hands, where her fingers were moving almost in a blur with how much she was tinkering.

“Oh,” Pidge said, her ministrations coming to a stop. “I’m fine, really. Just thinking.”

“About these?” Lance questioned, pointing down at her paper still sitting on the table. “Because I swear to God I don’t even recognize any of those equations. I think I’m going crazy.”

“That’s not our work,” Pidge hastily corrected, not wanting to make Lance feel even more lost and confused in this class. “Those are just some calculations for this robot I’m building.”

Lance’s mouth dropped open, his eyes squinting at Pidge in disbelief. Finally, he shook his head. “Of _course_  you can build robots,” he said. “You’re like some mad, super-genius, you know that?”

“Shut up,” Pidge scoffed. She was quick to reject the praise aloud, but internally she could feel herself brimming with excitement. Lance thought so highly of her, sounded so impressed just now. If he asked, she would build him an entire robot from scratch without hesitation.

“No, I’m serious,” Lance insisted. “I’m about to get tutored by some mad, super-genius. Please don’t hate me when you try to tutor me.”

“Stop worrying about it, you’re gonna be fine,” Pidge promised, and Lance sighed loftily and exaggeratedly, lamenting that he sure hoped so, even going so far as to put his hand to his head and swoon. God, Pidge couldn’t believe the size of her crush on this idiot. Or, like, she _could_ , but still. It was fucking massive.

The rest of the day passed both fast and slow. It probably had something to do with that adage about time flying when you’re having fun, except in this case “fun” was “anxiety”. One moment she’d be sitting there, looking forward to the time she was going to spend with Lance, and the class she was in would seem to drag by, seconds as long as minutes as long as hours. But then she’d get to thinking and all her worries and fears would creep in and then suddenly the class was over, and the next, and the next…

Pidge stood on the front steps of the school, her backpack flung over her shoulder and her head bent over her phone. She hadn’t gone so far as to text Lance, sure he would show up from somewhere out of the flood of never-ending students racing towards their cars, but at least looking at her phone made her feel not awkward and out of place.

“Hey.” Pidge jumped, her head jerking up to meet dark eyes and darker hair.

“Keith,” she said, tucking her phone back into her pocket. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” Keith said. “Just making sure you really don’t need a ride home. Lance is probably the most forgetful person I know, so.”

“I don’t think he’s gonna forget,” Pidge said, but now all her nerves were redoubled and she had to restrain herself from suddenly looking intently through the crowd, scanning as hard as she could for the tall, skinny idiot she was practically in love with. “I mean, his grade kind of depends on this.”

“Okay,” Keith said. “Let me know if you need me to come back to pick you up, though,” he said. And then his mouth pulled up into a smirk, his eyes twinkling darkly as he said, “And, you know. Have fun.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Pidge practically growled, and Keith opened his mouth to answer when a shout rang out instead.

“Keith!” an unmistakable voice called, before an arm was suddenly slung around Pidge’s shoulder, pulling her into a warm, sturdy side. She tried to ignore it, tried to will down her blush and her automatically widening eyes, but she could hardly control herself, especially when Keith was giving her that subtle but knowing look. “Not trying to steal my study-buddy, are you?”

“I was just making sure you weren’t going to forget her,” Keith said with a shrug. “You know, like you forgot me that one time at the mall —”

“That was _one time_!” Lance moaned, and he kicked out at Keith, still leaning on Pidge, while Keith deftly stepped out of the way to avoid the assault. “Besides, I would never do that to good ol’ Pidgey, here,” Lance insisted. “She’s going to turn me into a genius.”

Keith stared at him flatly. And then he said, “Good luck,” completely deadpan, and Lance let out an offended screech, trying and failing to kick Keith once more. Finally, he said, “Come on Pidge, we don’t need to associate with _scum_  like Keith!” And he turned her around and led her away with a pompous and exaggerated, “Hmph!”

He released her soon after, but Pidge’s entire side was still entirely too aware of the contact it had been in with Lance, hot and thrumming with energy. Lance, on the other hand, was completely unaware of the state Pidge was in.

“I’m parked over here,” Lance explained, pointing towards a cluster of cars on the further end of the parking lot. “That’s only because I forgot to turn in my parking permit form early enough and got stuck with a shitty space, but there’s little benefits,” he said. “Like, you know how there’s practically always buses that arrive late? Well from all the way over here, I can come in with a whole crowd of people from a bus. I haven’t gotten a tardy slip in months,” he laughed, and Pidge laughed with him.

Lance was always good at that, the whole conversation thing. Pidge quickly realized that all her worrying had been for naught, because the second they got in the car the conversation continued to flow naturally. Lance was enough off a chatterbox to keep the conversation going himself if he had to, though he didn’t, easily pulling Pidge into the conversation and turning it on her if he wanted to. It was like topics and connections between conversation points in his mind were endless, something that left him with no anxiety over the thought of prolonged conversation with someone he wasn’t entirely familiar with. It was so foreign to Pidge, so completely something she couldn’t relate to, and yet it was amazing to witness.

She thought about all the times Lance had called himself dumb, had complained over his lack of understanding of physics and tried to convince Hunk there was no hope left for him. And sure, maybe he wasn’t exactly a science prodigy, but it was clear he was smart and talented in completely different areas. Pidge was suddenly entirely assured that Lance could win any debate he wanted. She imagined he could talk himself out of a speeding ticket, if he had to.

Before she knew it, they were pulling up in front of her house, Lance having interrupted the conversation whenever he needed a direction, and Lance hopped out of the car and walked towards her house with the ease and familiarity of one who’d been there a thousand times.

Pidge gave a silent thanks to the fact that Matt was apparently not home, having probably gone out for food or something with a friend, and she unlocked the front door and led Lance through the foyer and up to her room.

Walking into her room with Lance in tow, Pidge felt like she was suddenly seeing it for the first time, wondering what Lance was thinking. What did he think of all the machine parts and pieces littered around her room? About the space posters tacked to her walls? About her messy bed and disorganized desk and slightly clothes-strewn floor?

“Um. Sorry for the mess,” Pidge said awkwardly.

“You kidding me?” Lance scoffed. “This is so much cleaner than my room.” He crossed the room and clambered onto her bed, still with that kind of familiarity that made Pidge long for this to happen more, for that familiarity to actually _be_  there instead of just Lance’s unwavering confidence. She followed him to the bed, hoping she didn’t seem completely awkward and out of place in her own room.

Her backpack landed heavily on the bed, constantly chock-full of books and papers and binders and bits of machinery. She pulled out the books she needed, both the physics book they were assigned along with her own notes, and leaned against the wall beside Lance, flipping them both open on her lap.

“Do you have a specific place you want to start?” Pidge asked, glancing at Lance quickly before looking back to her book. Her thumb was scraping back and forth over the edge of it, almost as if it was trying to roll a gear against itself.

“I don’t know,” Lance sighed, suddenly sounding self-conscious. “Like, the beginning? I feel like we keep adding new stuff on top of everything we’ve already learned, except I never really learned it that well to begin with…”

“That’s fine,” Pidge assured him, and she flipped through the book until she was on the right page. She went slowly, explaining things in newer and different ways than their brain-dead teacher had. And whenever Lance seemed particularly confused, she went back and explained it another way, again and again until she could _see_  the information click in Lance’s expression, his eyes lighting up and his head nodding in sudden understanding.

Tutoring Lance really wasn’t as hard as everyone had tried to make her think, and she seemed to have a pretty good handle on keeping Lance on task. She even had him practice a few problems, pointing out the tricks she usually used along with the kinds of things the book usually did to try to trip them up. After an hour, they’d reviewed the entire first unit and Lance was looking more excited about physics than he probably ever had been before.

“I don’t think I’ve ever known as much physics as I do now,” Lance proclaimed, slouching back against the wall and stretching out more thoroughly across Pidge’s bed. “And that’s sad, ‘cause we’ve been in this class for more than a semester now, but I’m serious.”

“Honestly, it’s Mr. Haver’s fault,” Pidge assured. “He’s not a very good teacher.”

Lance opened his mouth to respond, looking enthusiastic like he might have a story or two to share on the topic, but Pidge heard the front door slam shut, and she said, “Shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“My brother’s home,” Pidge sighed, just as footsteps began thundering up the stairs. She silently mourned the loss of all the stories Lance had been about to tell, secretly loving it when he’d go off on dramatic tangents. He just had a way of bring a story to life, making everyone around him invested in what he was saying. Keith argued that it was just the fact he spoke twice as loud as everyone else, but Pidge had to disagree.

“Pidge!” Matt yelled. “Whose car is that out front?” Without waiting for an answer, he slammed into her bedroom, the door bouncing off the wall as he stood in the bedroom. Matt froze in place, eyes widening slightly upon seeing a boy sitting on his little sister’s bed. Pidge simply prayed that his eyebrows weren’t about to start wiggling with the implication of it all. “Oh. Hello.”

“Hi,” Lance greeted with a wave. He looked incredibly small and sheepish, sitting in the middle of her bed with his long legs folded up beneath himself. He wore a small impish grin, eyes uncertain like he wasn’t sure how Matt would react to his presence.

“This is my brother, Matt,” Pidge introduced with a sigh. “Matt, this is Lance.” She waited, shoulders tense and ready to cringe when Matt inevitably gasped or screamed or somehow gave her secret away otherwise. Instead, he remained completely calm and cool, only a small glint in his eye even showing he’d registered exactly who Lance was.

“Nice to meet you,” Matt said quickly, leaning against the door jam. Pidge watched him closely, eyes narrowed into a warning glare. If he dared to say anything suggestive whatsoever, Pidge was prepared to biff a text book in his direction without any hesitation. Somehow sensing this unspoken threat, Matt simply cleared his throat.

He eyed their books spread out across the bed before saying, “Any time for a break? I kind of need your help in the workshop, Pidge.”

“You have a workshop?” Lance asked, perking up. He looked to Pidge in a mixture of excitement and disbelief, his grin growing by the second. As much as Pidge was enjoying the one-on-one time with Lance, she’d seen him wear that look of insistence before. He wasn’t going to shut-up about the workshop thing until he found out more about it. And secretly, Pidge was the smallest bit excited to show off that part of her life to him.

“Yeah. C’mon, we’ll show you,” Pidge said, resigning herself to her fate. She highly doubted Matt actually needed her help. He helped her as often as she helped him, anyway, having fresh eyes on a project more helpful than almost anyone could imagine. No doubt Matt just wanted Lance to see their workshop, hoping to impress him on Pidge’s behalf. Pidge was more afraid that he wouldn’t be impressed. It was pretty much a nerd-cave, after all.

The three of them traipsed down the stairs, Pidge falling into step beside Matt automatically.

“Dad’s working late tonight,” he informed, drawing a groan out of Pidge. He worked late practically every night, these days. She knew being a literal rocket scientist was hard work, but she still didn’t think it was fair that she barely got to see her own dad anymore. He might as well actually be on a separate planet.

“And mom?”

They led Lance through the living room and the kitchen and finally out into the garage. What had once been a storage place for cars and gardening equipment was now a super-tech nerd-lair, every surface covered in half-finished inventions and blueprints and machinery. Lance let out a breath when he walked into the room, a small portion of the wall covered in fairy-lights in an attempt to make the dark and grungy workshop a bit more homely. It was kind of pointless, really. Neither she nor Matt really took the time to think of the atmosphere when they were elbow-deep in their latest project.

“This is nuts,” Lance said, looking around the room in awe. He picked up a little gear shift, flicking one gear and watching them spin around each other. “You guys just... build stuff in here?”

“I mean, sometimes we have instruction manuals —”

“Shut up, Pidge,” Matt said, putting her attempt at a humble tirade to an end. “Yeah, we build all sorts of stuff in here. Pidge is almost done with the robot — she’s entering it into a competition in a couple of months.” Matt picked up the pyramid shaped robot, holding it into the air.

Pidge loved that robot as much as she resented it. She could feel that it was close to working, to finally being fully operational, but the few details that remained out of reach, keeping the robot unfinished, were driving her insane. Why’d she try to build a flying pyramidal robot anyway?

“I call it Rover,” Pidge announced, because she couldn’t help herself, and Lance let out a breathless sound of surprise as he stepped forward and ran his fingers along the robot in Matt’s hands.

“This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said reverently. “What does it do?”

“Nothing yet,” Pidge sighed, snatching the robot out of Matt’s hands and flipping it over, carefully flicking the control panel open. “I’m really close, but... Well, I need to better calculate the force of electric fields, which is super hard because electric fields make no fucking sense, but when it’s done it’ll be able to hover and move with a remote control. And it’ll never turn off, charging through these solar panels I’ve embedded in the sides here,” she said, pointing out the striped markings along the sides. “And when it’s up and running it’ll be able to do a number of things. It has a camera on the front and an audio input, so it can record things for me, and it’ll be able to hold about ten times its weight...” She trailed off, realizing she was rambling, something she tended to do when she got excited about the things she was making. It normally wasn’t an issue, considering it was usually just Matt she was talking to, who would even jump in with his own excited input, but this was different. This was Lance. She finished by awkwardly clearing her throat, concluding her accidental speech with, “Um. Yeah.”

She stared at Lance for a moment, afraid she’d overwhelmed him and freaked him out, by the way his mouth was hanging open, looking ready to catch flies. “Pidge,” Lance said seriously, stepping forward to place his hands on her shoulders. “You have to show me Rover when it’s done.”

Pidge’s face split into a grin. “Okay.”

After that, Lance was demanding to know what practically everything in the workshop was. He scurried from table to table, pointing to both Matt and Pidge’s inventions, asking what they did and how they worked and, _no way, really!? Can you show me?_

Without realizing, hours passed. Her and Matt had dug our practically every stupid thing they’d ever made, and Lance had even begun to pitch his own — usually insane and implausible — ideas for inventions, absolutely convinced that they could create anything under the sun. They lost track of time entirely until the door to their workshop opened, their mom poking her head in and inquiring whether her children ever planned on eating dinner.

“Oh, and who’s this?”

Pidge, who was standing on a table in order to demonstrate how her metal butterfly worked, paused before throwing it through the air. “Oh, this is my friend Lance,” she said. “I’m tutoring him in physics.”

“Nice to meet you, Lance!” her mother greeted immediately. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“Wow, it’s dinner-time already?” Lance said incredulously. He looked around as if to spot a clock, ultimately remembering the watch on his wrist and glancing down at that. He chuckled lowly, shaking his head. “And I’d love to, but I can’t. My mom’s expecting me...”

“Well, you’re welcome anytime,” her mom answered politely, before, “Katie, get down from there before you break your neck. And walk Lance to the door.”

Pidge rolled her eyes but jumped off the table, grabbing Lance’s wrist to pull him back inside the house. They went back upstairs to get his bag, and when they got back to the main foyer they could hear Matt and her mom talking in the kitchen, dishes clinking and clanging as they prepared whatever it was they were going to eat tonight.

“Thanks for having me,” Lance said, smiling so brightly it practically blinded Pidge. She had to restrain herself from pitching forwards and collapsing into his arms. As it was, she simply nodded along like a fool, watching as Lance leaned back against the front door and looked effortlessly cool. “And for tutoring me. And for showing me all your cool inventions.”

“It was no problem,” Pidge said happily. “Seriously. Whenever you’re ready for another tutoring session —”

“Tomorrow?” Lance said, looking strangely hopeful. When Pidge hesitated for just a split second, opening and closing her mouth in shock, Lance rushed to fill the silence. She silently cursed herself for not speaking faster. “I mean, it’s fine if you’re busy. Or don’t want to. Just, I’m free whenever, you know.”

“Tomorrow works for me,” Pidge said, unable to hold back her grin now, and she felt like Lance’s expression was matching hers exactly. He stood there for a moment too long, the air between them becoming strangely charged, before he shook his head and took a step back, opening the door behind him.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and Pidge repeated the sentiment, unable to look away as he walked to his car. He turned back to look at her house when he got to his car, immediately seeing her in the window. She could’ve sworn she saw him smirk, and then he waved and hopped in his car, leaving Pidge breathless and flustered.

The second she walked into the kitchen, both Matt and her mother were looking at her with identical expressions of nosiness and excitement. Groaning, Pidge snatched her dinner and retreated to her room in order to avoid them, deciding they could eat at the table alone that night. Reviewing every moment she’d spent and laughed and smiled with Lance was a better use of her time, anyway. Something she could do while eating on her bed and grinning wildly as her thoughts spun around him.

—

The next morning, Keith just stared at her expectantly as she got in his car. She pretended not to notice, ignoring him as she tossed her bookbag onto the floor before propping her feet on the dashboard. They were still sitting in her driveway, Keith staring at her blatantly waiting for details without wanting to say anything.

“ _Well_?” he finally demanded, giving up on thinking Pidge would just start gushing the second she got in the car. And good thing, too, because she was honestly practically vibrating with excitement.

She ended up spilling everything to Keith on the drive to school, talking about a mile a minute and _feeling_  how overwhelming her crush was and how unable she was to stop it.

And there really was no stopping it — not when Lance continued to do everything needed in order to stoke it. Again, after school, he decided to drive her, seeing as they planned to study once more. He’d texted her to inform her, when they’d barely ever texted before, mainly just about school work or a question about one of their other friends.

[3:28] Lance: heyooo can i drive you home again?

[3:28] Lance: for The Studiez

[3:32] Pidge: lmao yeah you can, thanks!

When she told Keith, again over text, he’d just sent a bunch of winking emojis in response. And when the time came to get in Lance’s car, Pidge was no longer anxious and nervous about every little thing. Talking to Lance was way too easy, way too comfortable. It was practically _hard_  to be worried.

On the way to Pidge’s house, Lance got inspired. He took a premature turn and they ended up in a little coffee shop in a small shopping center, their books all spread out over a table. Lance insisted on buying Pidge’s drink (“It’s the least I can do for you tutoring me.”) and Pidge tried with her entire being to convince herself not to think of this as something that it wasn’t.

And they continued like this. With every passing day they continued to find excuses to be together. Pidge hadn’t driven home with Keith since before she’d started tutoring Lance, and every day they went to Pidge’s house or some kind of coffee shop. Once, they’d even gone to Lance’s house, though this had involved many siblings that had insisted on pestering them, resulting in Lance locking the door of his room and dragging Pidge out onto the roof so they could finally get some peace and quiet. And they weren’t even just studying all the time — they’d go through a unit and Lance would do some practice problems, and then their study session would devolve (or maybe _evolve_ ) into a hang out session. All the time Pidge spent with Lance felt natural and fun and like something she wanted to do as often as possible.

The best thing was how interconnected she suddenly felt with all her friends. Instead of Pidge eating lunch with Keith and Lance eating lunch with Hunk, they all convened during their lunch hour, ending up claiming a table together and having their lunch become more fun and exciting then it’d ever been before.

To top it all off, Lance invited her to a _party_.

This, Pidge decided, was sure-fire proof that they were actual real friends now, not just study-buddies. She’d never been to a party before — she wasn’t exactly friends with the kind of people who threw them or got invited to them — but her lack of party experience didn’t deter her in any way from immediately saying yes.

Hunk and Keith ended up tagging along as well. Hunk wasn’t really one for drinking, so he offered to drive them all, which they readily agreed to, and then they were piling into his car after school and driving to their delinquent destination. It was a big house, obviously some rich kid in their grade whose parents were out for the weekend, and they wasted no time in barging inside and grabbing drinks amongst the rest of the drunk teens.

Pidge drank hers with caution. She’d never actually been drunk before, something that Keith knew well and had him giving her knowing and suspicious glances all throughout the beginning of the night. He could definitely hold his liquor, the only real difference in him being that he smiled a bit more easily and laughed a bit more loudly.

She was more focused on Lance than the contents of her cup or anything else around her really, he was in his element in the party scene. She watched as he approached people and started conversations, dramatic and loud over the bass of the music. She watched as he downed a cup of beer presumably, a chugging contest that he’d bugged Keith into participating in. No matter what he was doing or who he was with, there was one underlying similarity the whole time.

The dancing. He never stopped. Even as the music changed and shifted through different songs and different genres, he continued to shake and shimmy and gyrate accordingly. Sometimes it looked cool and attractive, other times it was downright hilariously bad. The music seemed to move right through him, with or without his permission.

He caught her staring once or twice, at which point he usually performed a particularly terrible dance move in her honor. She laughed every time despite herself, despite how badly she wanted to seem disapproving or at the very least unamused. Lance lit up whenever she’d laugh, though, so she couldn’t regret it. He looked so satisfied, like he’d achieved something great by putting that smile on her face.

It was after one of these silent exchanges from across the room that Lance finally returned to their friend group, grinning wildly and shaking his hips all the way there. Hunk and Keith let out similar unamused groans as they watched Lance make a complete fool out of himself in public, but Pidge couldn’t quiet the telltale heavy beating of her heart.

“You need a refill?” Lance asked as he reached her side, bumping into her and slinging his arm around her shoulders. She hadn’t even noticed that the cup in her hands was empty now, only taking distracted sips of it whenever she noticed the people around her were drinking out of their own. In all honesty, she was beyond confused. Why were people so obsessed with this stuff?

“Yes,” Pidge said instantly, because she wanted to be having as much fun as everyone else seemed to be and still felt nothing from the drink she’d already consumed. The only problem was, she wasn’t certain if she could stomach anymore of the lukewarm and unappealing drink she’d had before. “Do they have anything a bit less…”

“Weak?” Lance tried, eyebrows furrowing together as he attempted to decipher her thoughts on his own. Pidge laughed outright at that, shaking her head fervently. She had to think of a way to phrase this that wouldn’t make her seem lame...

“Disgusting,” Pidge deadpanned, holding the cup out from her face so she no longer had to smell it.

Lance laughed, bending over Pidge’s shoulder in order to do so, and she shook along with him as his laughter wracked both their bodies. Even as her cheeks heated up with embarrassment, realizing how young and naive she’d probably made herself sound, she couldn’t bring herself to regret her words. Lance was clinging to her now, dancing clumsily as he used her for support and giggled his way through it.

“I swear it tastes better the more you drink it,” Lance promised, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the kitchen anyway. “The good stuff is always a little more difficult to find. Here —“ Lance hopped up onto the counter — a stranger’s counter, oh God — and started rifling through the shelves higher up. He let out a triumphant, “Aha!” and held a small bottle of something dark brown into the air, waggling it excitedly and raising his eyebrows up and down at Pidge.

“I can’t believe you’re stealing someone’s alcohol,” Pidge said, shaking her head as Lance jumped down and smacked the cabinet door back closed.

“It’s a party, my dear friend,” Lance said seriously, coming close to her and bending down so that his forehead almost touched hers. He’d had more than a few drinks already and he wasn’t quite as good at holding himself together as Keith was. “This is what you sign up for when you decide to throw one. Come on!”

Lance led her back to their friends, and when he pulled the bottle out from under his shirt and shook it conspiratorially, Keith’s face broke into a wild grin. “Oh, hell yeah,” he said, reaching for the bottle, which Lance withheld with a wink.

Hunk was just shaking his head, looking disappointed in Lance but entirely too used to his antics.

“Pidge gets the first drink,” Lance insisted, holding his chin up stubbornly. “It’s her first party — let’s make this memorable!”

And so Lance handed her the bottle, screwing the top off for her and almost spilling some of the liquid inside over the lip. “Alright, Pidge,” he said, his tone surprisingly serious all of the sudden, like he was bestowing upon her some grand knowledge. “This shit’s gonna burn going down. Just take a swig and hand it off, it’s okay if you cough.”

Pidge did just that — the swigging and coughing, that is — and Keith followed after her, barely even grimacing as the liquid-fire graced his throat. It went around the circle twice more, and by the time Lance had recapped it and stashed it behind a plant in case they wanted more later, Pidge was feeling a little light-headed. In a good way.

She wasn’t feeling as stupid as a lot of other people appeared, though, so that was a good thing. One guy wasn’t wearing any clothes except for his underwear, and no one seemed to find this something that needed an explanation. There was a group of girls standing on a table and singing loudly, and Pidge could spot at least three people fast asleep on several different surfaces.

All too soon, things kind of became a blur. Not because she was so totally wasted that she couldn’t remember them, but because everything seemed to happen faster and slower at once. It was too much trouble to concentrate on any one thing for too long, and conversation dipped and eased and skipped its way from topic to topic, no one trying too hard to cling to any one particular thing. Laughter came easily, moderately silly things suddenly hilarious and absolutely idiotic things the actual peak of comedy.

At one point, Lance tripped over the corner of a carpet and instead of helping him up, Pidge laughed so hard she somehow ended up on the floor beside him. Which somehow ended up with Lance sitting on her, and Keith chanting, “One, two, three — down!” Lance cheered and banged the floor by her head and Pidge groaned, struggling to get him off her while laughing all the while.

And then, after taking even more shots and drinking another beer — hey, these really did taste better the more you had — they found a _pool_. It was just out back, meaning it wasn’t exactly hidden or particularly hard to find, but the fact that one moment they didn’t know about it and the next they did meant that their levels of excitement suddenly spiked through the roof.

Hunk tried to caution them, asking them if they really thought this was a good idea, to which they all decided that _hell yes_ , this was possibly the best idea they’d ever had. Afterwards Hunk pointed out the fact that they didn’t have any bathing suits, to which Pidge immediately stripped off her outer layers. Underwear was just like a bikini, right?

Lance cheered anyway, pretending to throw singles at her like she was a stripper, before getting down to his underwear too. Keith followed suit, having much difficulty with his pants have having to lean heavily on Lance for balance.

Soon enough, they had all jumped into the pool, Hunk following after much begging, and they proceeded to have the most fun Pidge could ever remember having in a pool. The whole thing was full of breathless laughter and gasping as they exerted themselves while swimming around and trying to shove each other under. At one point, Lance captured her in his hold and held her against him, making her squeal and try to escape, though she didn’t actually mind at all.

The thing about being drunk, Pidge realized, wasn’t that you were a completely different person. It didn’t make you act like someone you weren’t, wouldn’t make you do something you normally wouldn’t consider. It just… took out the middle-man of decision making, so to say. Instead of thinking, _maybe I should jump off the roof_  and having an answering voice in your mind go, _nah, that sounds pretty dangerous,_  there was just silence. And that turned into thinking that doing the stupid thing was not actually, in fact, stupid.

This was what led Pidge to getting out of the pool with a new and awesome idea in mind.

“I’m gonna do a dive!” she called out, her words slightly slurred, as she walked along the edge of the pool and readied herself for something that would probably look totally awesome.

She stopped a little further along the pool, holding her arms above her head and leaning forward slightly in preparation for her dive. She bent her knees, her toes curling around the lip of the edge, and pushed off.

The edge of the pool was slick and slippery, though, and she tripped off of it more than dove. And, in her drunken haste, she hadn’t realized that walking along the edge of the pool meant walking to a much shallower area of it.

So she sluiced through the water, at much the wrong angle in much too shallow an area, and her head and neck cracked against the floor of the pool. For a moment, she felt pain — white-hot and racing all throughout her body. And then — panic. Shock, maybe. She couldn’t move, her limbs failing to cooperate as she tried to swim back above the water.

She sucked in an automatic breath, her chest seizing with the influx of water, and _still_  she couldn’t convince herself to move, couldn’t swim to the top.

 _Am I going to die like this?_  she thought to herself. How embarrassing. Drunk and idiotic and for some reason unable to swim, unable to _move_.

But then arms were wrapping around her, dragging her to the surface, and Pidge coughed and spasmed and gasped, Lance’s face close to hers, eyes wide and forehead creased with worry.

“Ambulance,” Pidge gasped out. Now that she’d caught her breath, it was coming super-quick, shock and panic taking over. No matter how much she breathed, how quickly she gasped for air, her body refused to feel replenished.

“Pidge, what —“

“Can’t move,” Pidge said, and her voice broke on a sob. Her eyes were moving this way and that, practically rolling in her head, as she begged her body to _move, just move, dammit!_  She tried to lift an arm, a finger, a _toe_ , and nothing responded to her. She could only whip her head back and forth, realizing as she did that she was sobbing, “I can’t move, I can’t move!”

Her friends scooped her out of the pool, shoving her onto the edge, and she dully thought that that should hurt, that she should feel the hard concrete scraping against her skin, and yet she barely felt anything. Lance had run inside, and moments later the sound of ambulances were blaring in the distance.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Keith was chanting beside her, brushing his fingers through her hair with his eyes suddenly clear. Pidge felt completely sober too, the pain and panic having apparently burned her high away.

Everything happened in a blur. She didn’t know if it was because she was in shock or what, but one moment she was lying there hyperventilating and the next she was on an ambulance, having a light shined in her eyes as the medics asked her friends questions. They asked her if she could move her leg, her arm, her hand, and Pidge couldn’t answer because she didn’t want to acknowledge what was happening, didn’t want to speak the truth into existence.

And then she was in the hospital, having barely even comprehended the ambulance blaring its way across town with her inside it. She was pushed through on a stretcher, people running her down the halls and into a room. She passed out somewhere around there, because she still _hurt_ , and everything was loud and bright and so completely overwhelming.

When she woke back up, hours had passed. Everything was calm. She was in a hospital gown, she gathered from looking down at her chest, and as she opened her eyes and moved around she heard voices.

“Katie,” someone said gently. Her mother. Pidge blearily looked over at her, trying to blink the sleep out of her eyes. When that didn’t work, she went to wipe it away with her fingers, and a choked breath mangled its way through her throat as she realized she couldn’t.

“Mom,” she whispered hoarsely, tears welling in her eyes, and her mom hushed her and leaned forward, pressing kisses all over Pidge’s forehead as she began to cry.

“Call the doctor,” someone said — her father — and Pidge peered past her mother to look at her dad, who was _here_. God, he was always either at work or sleeping or hastily kissing their cheeks before rushing out the door. And now he was standing by her bed, looking at her with soft, devastated eyes.

She realized he’d been talking to Matt, who left the room in a blur only to return a moment later with news that the doctor was on his way. When he saw Pidge staring at him, he smiled,coming over to roughly rub her hair. God, she hated it when he did that. She always swatted him away before he could ruin it too much, and maybe Matt realized this, because he stopped sooner than usual and then smoothed out the damage himself.

When the doctor came, it was with a flurry of questions for Pidge. Can you move this? Can you feel that? Does this hurt here?

And no, she couldn’t move this. None of her limbs thought that responding to her would be a good time, and so they didn’t. They remained stubbornly still and immobile no matter how much Pidge tried to convince them to move. It was like trying to move her own hair, or trying to move someone else’s leg. She just _couldn’t_.

As for feeling things, that’s where everything got iffy. She could feel touch on her face and shoulders perfectly well. Somewhere around her chest she went numb, the sensations of fingers on her skin completely absent, only noticeable when pressure was applied. She couldn’t feel all the way down her arms, but the backs of her hands could feel sensations again, and her thumb and pointer finger could feel almost as well as her face, though it turned back to numb the closer you got to her pinky finger. Her legs were just like her chest. When she closed her eyes, she didn’t even know if someone was rubbing their hand down her leg, which was horribly creepy. But if they squeezed, she could tell which leg they were squeezing, which the doctor said had something to do with the blood flow.

And when the doctor took turns pinching her skin, asking if she could feel the pain — she couldn’t. It was all so incredibly disconcerting, and Pidge found herself wishing she could just go to sleep. Maybe then she could wake up and find out this had all just been some horrible nightmare.

Unfortunately, the doctors didn’t want her to go to sleep yet. They wanted to talk to her, wanted to ask more questions and give her more answers. It turned out she’d broken her neck at the C4/5 vertebrae, thus damaging her spinal cord and paralyzing her from the shoulders down. The word “quadriplegic” was mentioned several times, and it sent shivers down Pidge’s skin — the parts of it she could feel, anyway.

There was discussion about physical therapy and normal therapy. Talk of what she would have to do to get used to her new life as a quadriplegic person, about how she’d need help adjusting and how there were all these neat, expensive things they could buy to make her now-challenging life just a little bit easier.

The doctors said chance of regaining movement in her limbs were astronomically low, and still Pidge found herself clinging to that hope a ridiculous amount. She’d overcome tons of things in the past. She’d struggled with inventions for _weeks_  until they finally clicked, everything suddenly making sense in her head as she was trying to fall asleep one night.

Besides, she couldn’t just _be_  paralyzed. That wasn’t… That wasn’t a thing that just _happened_. Stuff like this was what you saw on the news, was what happened to other people. You felt sorry for them and thought about how much it sucked and that was it, because you knew it wouldn’t happen to you, knew it couldn’t possibly happen to you.

When her parents started talking to her about the list of physical therapists the doctor had suggested, Pidge dismissed them. Going to the physical therapist would be like… finalizing it. Accepting it.

Her parents blessedly dropped the subject, although they had that look in their eye that suggested it wouldn’t be for long. They were pretty quickly distracted though, their attention pulled suddenly in another direction.

Pidge’s legs had started bouncing in the bed, and Pidge _wasn’t doing that_. They called the doctor back in, frantic and somewhat hopeful. Turned out, paralyzed people’s limbs could still move, just not of their own volition. If Pidge’s body felt like moving, like twitching or jittering or bouncing, it would. If it moved too much, she would get muscle relaxants. Again, Pidge’s hopes were squashed.

Everything just felt so… fake. She still felt as if she should be waking up at any minute, where you shoot up in bed sweating and panting and realize, _Oh, that wasn’t real at all. I should’ve realized — the doctor had eight arms._

But no, the doctor had only two arms and Pidge refused to wake up from this horrible nightmare. Entirely new and different revelations kept being made, like the fact that she couldn’t scratch an itch, the realization of which made what felt like her entire body breakout in desperate itches everywhere.

Finally, Pidge was allowed to sleep — her family still by her side as she did — and it was scary waking up because she was in a different position than when she’d fallen asleep. Apparently she’d been turned in her sleep in order to prevent blood clots, which was also the purpose of the machines now strapped to her arms and legs, routinely squeezing her limbs to encourage blood flow.

“Ah, you’re awake,” someone said gently. It wasn’t her family, because none of them were in the room anymore — what time was it? — so she turned her head, getting a good look at the beautiful woman before her. She had long, silver hair and dark skin, looking much younger than everyone else Pidge had seen around here.

“You’re a doctor?” Pidge said, and the woman smiled gently. She came forward, shifting Pidge into a new position, which made Pidge flush. She should be able to do this stuff herself.

“I’m an intern,” she said. “I’m finishing my degree right now, and then I’ll be here full time.”

“That’s awesome,” Pidge said genuinely, and the woman smiled at her.

“Do you know what you want to do when you grow up?”

“Invent things,” Pidge said automatically. But then she felt something in her grow heavy, her hopes sinking like an anchor through the ocean. How? How could she possibly invent anything like this?

The woman, maybe noticing Pidge’s change in demeanor, quickly continued the conversation. “That’s amazing,” she said. And then, “I’m Allura, by the way.” She fluffed Pidge’s pillows before taking a step away from her.

“Nice to meet you,” Pidge said automatically. “I’m Pidge.”

“Not Katie?” Allura said, clearly having seen her file. Pidge shrugged.

“That’s what my parents call me,” she said. “My brother called me Pidge when we were little, and it’s stuck. That’s what everyone calls me now.”

“Well then it’s nice to meet you too, Pidge,” Allura said kindly. She became a fixture in Pidge’s hospital room after that, visiting often and telling stories about other patients and college classes and her boyfriend. Pidge really grew to like her, glad to have someone as kind as her around, especially since Pidge was to be in the hospital a while longer. There was a lot of adjusting to do, a lot of tests to run, and a lot of equipment and processes that Pidge had to have and go through in order to adjust to everything. Right now, it was easier for the professionals to deal with it all, seeing as her family didn’t quite know everything yet.

Her family, too, was often with Pidge, entertaining her with stories of their own. It was the most time Pidge had spent with her dad in forever, and somewhere in the back of her mind she ended up thinking, _All I had to do to drag him away from work was paralyze myself._

And besides her family, her friends often visited. They’d apparently stuck around late into the night when Pidge had first been brought here, though they hadn’t been allowed into the room, seeing as they weren’t family. Now, though, she was allowed visitors aplenty, and they made great use of this, coming in a swarm of entertainment, keeping her occupied and from going crazy. Because without anyone around, she really couldn’t do anything except watch the TV on the wall. She couldn’t even change the channel during commercials or when a show she didn’t like came on.

Beyond frustrating was the fact that she couldn’t even use her phone, couldn’t scroll through twitter or text her friends or google everything there was to know about quadriplegics. So she truly did appreciate it when everyone visited, despite the fact that before all of this, alone-time was something she had very much appreciated. And she pretended not to notice the looks everyone shared. The ones where they got quiet, where their eyes got sad, where they tried not to show the obvious pity they were feeling.

And God, how Pidge didn’t want their pity. She was feeling enough of that herself, thank you very much. She just wanted to continue on with her life, and to maybe regain control of all her limbs, if that wasn’t too much to ask. When she expressed this — the desire to keep moving forward, not the sad and pathetic hope about becoming un-paralyzed — Lance took it to heart. He started bringing her all her schoolwork, constantly lamenting the fact that she wasn’t using her injury to avoid all school work for the rest of forever.

He wrote things that she needed to write for her, and Pidge, despite everything, could still feel her heart fluttering when she was around him. When he propped her notebook up against her unfeeling side with a grin as he wrote out her equations and essays.

Lance came the most often. Half the time he was accompanied by Keith and Hunk, and a lot of the times Pidge’s family was already with her, but sometimes it would be just the two of them. He could still make her laugh just as easily as he always could, and it was something that was very welcome in the fog of despair that seemed to have settled over her.

She got the feeling that Lance felt guilty about it all. He never said anything, but sometimes he’d get this look on his face…

Pidge wanted to tell him she didn’t blame him. Anyone could’ve invited her to that party, after all, and the alcohol was abundant — it wasn’t his fault she’d drank some. Nothing was anyone’s fault but hers. She’d said this, before, to her parents, but they insisted it wasn’t her fault either. That it was all chance and circumstance, not her own idiocy.

“I’m sorry,” Matt had said. “Did you just refer to yourself as an idiot? Because the last time I checked, you were a prodigy genius.”

Allura, too, often assured Pidge that everything would be all right. Pidge never said anything about it, about the worry, the dread and the fear and the anger, all building up inside her like this negativity whirlpool. But she must’ve known, somehow.

“Life’ll go on, Pidge,” Allura promised. “It might be different, and difficult in new ways, but it’ll go on.”

“I can’t control my bladder,” Pidge had said flatly, as if this was the end-all.

The look Allura had given her had said more than words. Pidge knew it looked like she was being pessimistic, but how could she not be? She couldn’t look to the bright side when there didn’t even seem to be one.

“I think you should start physical therapy,” Allura said, because Pidge had confided in her the reason she’d yet to start and Allura was now a traitor, Enemy No. 1.

Pidge just sighed, blowing her hair out of her face and knowing she would be crossing her arms just then, if she could.

“I’m serious,” Allura went on. “My boyfriend’s on that list, you know. He’s good at what he does.”

“Your boyfriend’s a physical therapist?”

Allura just shrugged, smiling, a knowing twinkle in her eye. “He’s had a bit more hands-on experience than other physical therapists.” And then, “Just think about it. Maybe your boyfriend can go with you, make it a bit easier.”

Pidge blanked. “My what-now?”

“Your boyfriend?” Allura said. “The tall one — whatshisname. Lance?”

Pidge flushed. “He’s not my boyfriend!”

And Allura, because she was as evil as she was sweet, grinned a horrible grin. “ _Oooooh_ ,” she said, and oh no. Pidge knew how much Allura liked to gossip, she was on the receiving end of it all the time. Allura just couldn’t turn down any form of juicy information. “But you _want_  him to be!” She concluded, honest-to-God clapping her hands together excitedly.

“Shut uuup,” Pidge groaned, turning her head to the side with a pout.

“Oh my God,” Allura said, full of excitement. “Come on! Tell me about him!”

“No way.”

“Tell me about him, Pidge!”

“Mm-mm.”

“I will stand here and pester you all day. You can’t run.”

And Pidge _laughed_. She broke down, tears coming to her eyes as she gasped for breath through her laughter. She ended up having to ask Allura to please wipe the tears off her cheeks, and then she spilled everything, about how cute and funny and nice and perfect Lance was. About how they’d really been hitting it off, hanging out more and more. About how now she was paralyzed. About how she doubted Lance would want to date her anymore, if he ever had.

Allura pointed at her sternly. “That boy obviously feels _something_  for you,” she said determinedly. “He visits you practically every day. He does your homework and texts for you and I swear I’ve seen him sleeping in that chair before,” Allura said, punctuating her sentence with a jab in the chair’s direction. It was true — Lance had fallen asleep, and Pidge had let him. He was cute when he slept, anyway.

But she couldn’t know if Lance actually _liked_  her. Like, he was just a super friendly guy. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body and was consistently nice to everyone he met. He probably just felt bad for her. Probably realized how bored Pidge was and was doing her a favor by relieving some of that boredom, that was all.

“I don’t think so,” Pidge said trepidatiously, and Allura gave her one of the sternest looks Pidge has ever seen from her.

And then, in a very un-nurse like manner, she said, “Don’t you dare fuck this up for yourself, Pidge.”

It wasn’t much longer after that when Pidge was finally admitted from the hospital. She actually felt excited about going home, about finally being in familiar walls without constantly being surrounded by near-strangers and the smell of bleach and antiseptic. Allura promised to visit her, the two of them having grown close over Pidge’s stay, and Pidge found that she was actually excited for that day to come, too.

What Pidge hadn’t expected about going home was how much it would _hurt_. Being so close to her workshop and unable to work in it. Lounging in her room, entirely unable to use her own laptop. All kinds of junk and mementos surrounding her that she’d never be able to properly interact with again.

If Pidge hadn’t been paralyzed, she would’ve gone and torn up her room, ripping posters from the walls and getting rid of the stuff she no longer had use for. Then again, if she weren’t paralyzed, she would feel perfectly fine being surrounded by all her shit. But still.

“You okay?” Matt asked. He was wrapping these straps around Pidge’s legs, which were connected to the machine that made sure she didn’t get blood clots.

Pidge got the feeling that Matt didn’t really know how to interact with her anymore. She understood, anyway. She wouldn’t know how to interact with herself either. After all, her and Matt’s biggest shared interest, shared activity, was their inventions. Their workshop. What could they even do together if Pidge couldn’t invent things?

“Yeah,” Pidge said, because technically, she was fine. Her muscles weren’t spasming, weren’t jerking her all over the bed and demanding she take a muscle relaxant. There wasn’t any odd and unexplained pain in her limbs, something that had happened a few times over the past few days that the doctors assured were perfectly normal. There wasn’t an itch she needed to scratch, nothing she currently needed assistance with.

So, yeah. Technically, besides the fact that she was completely immobile, she was fine. Physically.

Mentally, on the other hand… Well, she couldn’t exactly help the way she felt. She couldn’t help the crushing nature her feelings tended to take on lately, as if they could just crush her entirely flat if she happened to feel just one more thing. The hopelessness, the fear and anxiety and depression all building and building on top of her, impossible to shake off because she couldn’t even _move_.

But no one could see this pain. No one could just go ahead and fix it for her. It was hers to suffer through, hers to endure, for the rest of her entire life.

“You sure?” Matt said, and he grinned at her. It didn’t meet his eyes.

Pidge smiled back anyway. “Yeah,” she repeated. “I’m sure.”

—

Part of the reason why Pidge was so resistant to go to physical therapy was because she didn’t want _change_. Of course, being paralyzed was one hell of a change, but going into physical therapy felt like losing all hope. She’d felt too pathetic to ask anyone to google paralytic recovery stories for her, so instead she’d strained her mind in hopes of remembering any she might’ve read. When that failed, she’d gone on to make them up herself. She kept finding herself dreaming about walking and running around, creating all these new inventions in her free time. She’d wake up and feel panicked, as if someone had strapped her to a gurney and that was the only reason she couldn’t move.

“You ready?” her dad asked. It was strange that he was here. Pidge felt like she hadn’t ever seen him in broad daylight, which was a silly thing to think, but still felt true. He’d almost become one of the cryptids Pidge had always entertained herself with by researching in the middle of the night.

“No,” Pidge huffed. It was the truth. She’d agreed to coming to the physical therapy office, but she’d been trying to ignore the implications of it all as they’d driven here. Now, they were sitting in the parking lot and staring at the building.

“Sometimes you have to endure things you aren’t ready for,” her dad said wisely, turning to look at her. He reached out and held her hand. Pidge couldn’t hold his back, couldn’t squeeze his fingers for comfort. But she could feel her dad’s hand on hers, in places. Could feel that it was warm against her thumb.

With that, her dad got out of the car and retrieved and unfolded her wheelchair from the backseat. He was going to have to lift Pidge into it. She supposed it was a good thing she was so light. People would be lifting her for the rest of her life.

Pidge was wheeled into the building, her dad silent behind her. The inside of the building was friendly enough, the walls colorful and covered in encouraging posters that did absolutely nothing for Pidge. She tried to tell herself to stop being so pessimistic, to try to keep her chin up and act accordingly, if only for Allura’s boyfriend.

She’d ended up choosing him off the list. Really, it was only because of Allura that she was even here right now. She didn’t want to disappoint her. She would know if Pidge never went to this Shiro guy, and then whenever she visited Pidge she’d give her that stern look, her arms crossed, her eyebrows raised.

They came to a stop in the physical therapist’s waiting room. They weren’t alone in there, accompanied by an older woman and a mother with a son. Pidge avoided eye contact as she was wheeled to a stop, her father taking a seat beside her and offering her an encouraging smile. Pidge tried her best to return it.

“Why are you in a wheelchair?”

If Pidge could’ve stiffened, she would have. Instead, she just felt her eyes widen, her cheeks heating up as she turned her head to look at the little boy standing before her. His mother looked horrified.

“ _Emanuel_ ,” she said strictly. “We do _not_  ask — I’m so, so sorry —“

“It’s okay,” Pidge said. She mustered up a smile for the mother, before looking down towards the boy. Emanuel. “I broke my spine,” Pidge told him. “I can’t move anymore.”

“You can’t _move_?” he said incredulously.

“Nope.”

“At _all_?”

“Not at all,” Pidge agreed. The boy was just staring at her with wide, wide eyes. Beside her, her father looked anxious, worried. It was as if he wanted to keep Pidge from hearing the own words she was saying, as if she weren’t already living the truth of them every second of every day.

The mom was still looking horrified. She exchanged a look with Pidge’s dad, as if affirming that this was indeed true.

“Emanuel Thomas?” a man called, poking his head into the waiting room. He had a tuft of white hair at the front of his head.

“That’s us, Manny,” the mom said, ushering him towards the door. “Come on.”

The rest of the wait was silent, as Emanuel went through his physical therapy followed by the other woman — “Elena Jones?” — before it was finally Pidge’s turn.

“Katie Holt?”

“That’s us,” her dad said. He sounded as warm and friendly as always. He stood up and pushed Pidge into the next room. Pidge tried not to think about how she’d probably be getting pushed around for the rest of her life.

“Hi, welcome,” Shiro said, settling into a chair in the room. Pidge’s dad wheeled Pidge next to the chair she was supposed to be sitting in.

Then, her father stepped out, after being handed a pamphlet of what Pidge and Shiro would be discussing and doing during their session.

“So, Katie —”

“Pidge,” Pidge cut in. “I go by Pidge.”

Shiro’s eyes widened a bit. “You know, I think my girlfriend was telling me about you,” he said.

“Allura,” Pidge said, nodding. “Yeah.” And then, “I still don’t understand why I’m here, though. I’m paralyzed. I can’t _do_  any physical therapy.”

She could see the shift on Shiro’s face, his expression and posture changing from curious and familiar to the professional he was.

“A lot of people think that,” he said. “However, there’s still the slim chance you could regain mobility of your limbs. And even if you don’t, physical therapy helps you learn how to manage your day-to-day activities. And we help not only physically, but mentally and psychologically as well. There’s a lot more to physical therapy than what meets the eye.”

After that, Shiro had her do very basic exercises with her neck while he exercised her arms and legs for her, all the while keeping up a steady stream of conversation. Pidge could say, at least, that she didn’t hate it. It wasn’t _horrible_. But it also wasn’t the magic-genie-three-wishes kind of thing she’d been hoping for. Maybe she hadn’t been hoping for it explicitly, but the thought had definitely been there in the back of her mind, the idea that this man would open her eyes as easily as if she’d been looking in the wrong direction, saying just the right words to kick her body back into action again.

“What’s on your mind?” Shiro asked. He seemed to be able to know what Pidge was thinking, or at least _when_  she was thinking, because this wasn’t the first time in their session that he’d drawn her out of her thoughts.

If Pidge could have shrugged, she would have.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just… angry, I guess. I’m normally a really independent person, and suddenly I have to depend on everyone for everything.”

“I see…” Shiro said slowly. “And you think if you could gain some independence back into your life you’d feel happier?”

“Definitely,” Pidge sighed. If only it were possible…

“I think I know just the thing to do,” Shiro said. “Let’s call your dad back in here.”

It wasn’t long before Pidge learned about and was acquainted with sip-n-puff technology and mouth-sticks. At first, Pidge wasn’t too elated about the inventions, but as she realized they’d be able to return a degree of independence to her, she was all for them.

The sip-n-puff technology was a straw-like, motorized contraption that attached to her wheelchair. With its own calibrations, it allowed Pidge to move her wheelchair on her own by sucking and blowing into a straw. It was pretty nifty, with its ability to go forward, backward, and even turn, but it could definitely be a hell of a lot niftier.

Matt agreed.

Pidge’s parents were elated at her ability to use the straw, and Pidge nodded and played along until they finally left, leaving her alone with Matt.

“This needs a few upgrades,” she said. Matt already had a toolbox in hand.

Together, through Matt’s tinkering and Pidge’s suggestions, they took apart the motorization mechanism and applied a few enhancements and advancements of their own. They were able to calibrate it to Pidge’s breaths specifically, even inputting certain breathing patterns into it that would command it to do different things, such as pick up speed or go to a designated place.

The work gave Pidge a much-needed distraction and a not-so-much-needed reminder of how much she liked to build and create and how unable she was to do so. For the first time since her accident, she thought of her robot, Rover, and her complete inability to use it. The competition was very strict about their rules, and the robot was to be created and controlled entirely by one person’s hands. One person’s useless, paralyzed hands. No way would Pidge be able to participate in the competition anymore, the deadline finally creeping close enough that Pidge would usually be feeling a mixture of panic and excitement. No longer.

Pidge tried not to dwell on this, though. Again, she was newly sufficient in ways she hadn’t been before. She could now move around her room and house alone, and she had a mouth-stick which allowed her to use both her phone and her computer. Sure, typing took a hell of a lot longer, but at least she could _type_.

She started texting her friends again and doing her homework on her own, her teachers allowing her to type everything when before, plenty of them had demanded hand-written assignments. Pidge still refused to go to school, though. She may have been feeling particularly proud of herself and less-useless than she had since becoming paralyzed, but the thought of sitting inside a building, surrounding by people who would stare at her and pity her was unbearable. She’d rather stay at home and continue to learn in the privacy of her own room, thank you very much.

Despite her refusal to go to school, her friends seemed determined to keep her from becoming a hermit. They visited her regularly, bringing her the entertainment she never quite realized she was so desperately craving. Again, the one who visited her most often was Lance. He came practically every day and Pidge wasn’t sure whether he could tell that she was falling in love with him or not.

“Right on time,” Pidge said dryly as her door flew open, Lance tripping over the threshold, weighed down by his bulging backpack.

“I could never go a day without your stellar attitude, my fair lady,” Lance said exaggeratedly, and he dropped all his things on the floor, collapsing next to them with a groan. “I don’t understand how you used to carry all this stuff around. You’re _tiny_ ,” he complained, his eyes now shut as he laid on Pidge’s floor.

“I’m pure muscle,” Pidge argued, although she could definitely recall her back complaining as she was weighed down by her abundance of textbooks and binders. Eventually, she’d just learned to live with the extra weight.

“Well I think your teachers are having trouble remembering that I’m not a bodybuilder like you,” Lance scoffed. “Can’t they _see_  I’m a string bean?” he gestured to himself with a floppy hand, which then flung itself back onto the floor dramatically. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m just going to take a short nap.”

“Oh, no you’re not!” Pidge argued. “I’ve been bored and alone all day. I need you to help me do my homework.”

This, at least, got Lance’s attention. He sat up and stared at Pidge incredulously. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then he actually stuck a finger in his ear and twisted it around theatrically. “I thought I just heard you suggest fixing _boredom_  with _homework_.”

“That is correct,” Pidge said, trying as hard as possible to keep her face completely flat. Giggles kept trying to bubble up in her chest.

“Wrong!” Lance proclaimed, actually jumping up to point a finger in Pidge’s face. “Wrong, wrong, _wrong_. You need to have some actual fun.”

“Homework can be fun,” Pidge said. She didn’t believe this, obviously. She wasn’t a freak, homework was just as boring and seemingly pointless to her as it was to anyone else, but it was fun to rile Lance up.

“Oh my God,” Lance said. “I can’t believe the doctors missed it. Your ability to remember what fun is! It’s been paralyzed too!”

Pidge laughed, finally unable to help it anymore, and Lance’s grin was so triumphant and big that she felt bad for even holding out on him in the first place.

“Come on,” Lance said. “Just — think of something fun, and we’ll do it.”

Pidge had to resist the urge to snort. She could think of a lot of things that were fun, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she could do it. She couldn’t leave her house, for one thing. It was way too much work, way too much energy and commitment for a short little activity that was supposed to be fun. This left activities that were accomplishable in the house, most of which Pidge had already exhausted, if she was able to actually do it.

Maybe Lance saw some of her thoughts on her face, because he reached out and tipped her chin up, smiling at her as he did. “Just say something,” he said. “Anything. And I’ll make it happen.”

Pidge smiled at him grimly. Her mouth was moving before she’d even given herself a chance to think about what she wanted to say.

“I want to build things,” Pidge said, the words feeling heavy and leaden in her mouth. Yes, she wanted to build things. She missed using her brains for equations and calculations, missed fitting wires together and twisted screws in place, missed the methodic and entertaining way creating her inventions felt. She missed it all.

“Okay,” Lance said, nodding. “Okay. Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

“Lance, what are you —“

“Be right back!” Lance shouted over his shoulder, already out her door and pounding down the steps. Pidge just sat there, stunned and kind of shell-shocked, wondering what the fuck he was going to try to pull off.

Briefly, she heard voices downstairs — Lance and Matt? — and then the opening and closing of a door, followed by silence, followed by the opening and closing of a door again. And then —

Something was rattling loudly as the sound of footsteps thundered up the stairs, all stopping when Lance came bursting into Pidge’s room, her toolbox in hand.

“Lance —“

“Let’s get to building!” Lance said, plopping the heavy toolbox down on Pidge’s desk and grinning at her.

“Lance, I can’t —“

“Sure you can,” Lance interrupted her. “I’ll be the hands and you can be the eyes,” he said. “And the brain,” he added after a moment’s thought. “I’m good with my hands, I promise. I actually got a pretty good grade in tech ed,” Lance tacked on, grinning at Pidge winningly.

“Are you sure about this?” Pidge said slowly, and Lance nodded. He flipped open the toolbox, pulling out Rover, which he must’ve shoved in there.

“I brought this too in case you want me to help you finish it before the competition, but I figured we should practice with something else first, just to make sure I can follow your instructions right.”

Pidge’s heart was bursting in her chest, practically begging to be let free. She didn’t have the heart to tell Lance that she wouldn’t be able to compete, after all, so she just nodded instead.

“All right,” she said, excitement getting the best of her. “Okay. Yeah. Yeah, help me build something.”

It was cathartic, being able to put pieces and parts into something that worked again. Just like when she’d been helping Matt recalibrate her sip-n-puff, she felt like she was coming _alive_ , her brain finally doing something more useful than boring schoolwork.

Lance was surprisingly good at following directions for someone who rarely liked to sit still and listen. He had trouble paying attention in class for this very reason, anything not stimulating enough too-easily losing his attention. In past years, Pidge had watched Lance drift away from the class discussion time and time again, sometimes as easily as his phone buzzing on the table before him.

Pidge didn’t know if spending time tinkering with her was actually entertaining for him or if he was just that determined to entertain her, but he didn’t appear to grow bored and he certainly didn’t tune her out like she’d seen him do to teachers. In fact, after less than an hour of none-too-strenuous work, they’d created a little switchboard that lit up when they spoke. Surprisingly, Pidge didn’t grow irritated and grouchy at not being able to yank the tools away from Lance and do everything herself, much faster and better than he could. And Lance didn’t grow bored and restless, he actually seemed to enjoy what they’d done.

Lance was endlessly entertained with their new invention, watching it light up as he spoke with reverent eyes. “I can’t believe you can just get bored and throw something like this together,” he muttered, the lights growing and brighter and dimmer depending on how loud he was talking. This meant that he kept adjusting his volume randomly, enraptured with their invention.

“I make things all the time when I have nothing better to do,” Pidge said. She felt… lighter. This was actually pretty significant, because ever since she’d become paralyzed she’d felt heavier than she ever had entire life, stuck and unable to move. She barely weighed more than a hundred pounds soaking wet, and lately her parents kept worrying over whether she was losing weight, and still Pidge felt like her body was made of metal. As if the only reason she couldn’t move was because it was just so heavy.

But now… she felt light. It was probably the fact that she was feeling happy, for once. Genuinely happy and productive, having finally done something that wasn’t just sitting there, doing schoolwork and scrolling through the internet using her mouth-stick.

“It helps me come up with ideas to use later in my other inventions,” PIdge continued. “Sometimes I’ll make something really cool without really trying, which is always fun.”

“Damn,” Lance breathed, amazed. “You just _made_  this…”

“You helped,” Pidge pointed out, and Lance laughed self-deprecatingly.

“I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, though,” he said. “I was just following your instructions.”

“Sure, but you know what you were doing now,” Pidge hedged. “You could probably do it again without my help, if you wanted. Next time, I can explain what everything you’re doing means, and then you’ll really get it.”

“Next time?” Lance said, his lip curling up into a smirk as he looked up at Pidge. The invention flickered off between them, the lights going dark as silence fell. Pidge stuttered out an answer.

“Oh! I just mean… I didn’t mean to _assume_  — of course, only if you ever wanted to —“

“Woah! I’m just kidding!” Lance said hastily, interrupting her. “Seriously, I had fun. I’ll help you make things whenever you want.”

If Pidge’s entire body could’ve deflated in relief, it would have. Instead, she just let a probably embarrassingly dopey grin encompass her face. She desperately wanted to fling her arms around Lance, to hold him close and bury her face in his shoulder, but she couldn’t. She tried to express the same with her face, instead. Lance’s answering smile seemed to say that he got it, and he reached forward and placed his hand on Pidge’s, the warmth of his hand discernible in places of Pidge’s.

“Thank you,” Pidge said genuinely. Softly.

“Seriously, any time,” Lance added.

A beat.

“Now let’s take it apart,” Pidge said brightly. Lance’s eyes widened, his mouth dropping open as he spluttered.

“Wh — You’re not serious, are you?” he demanded.

“Sure,” Pidge said. “Then we can re-use the parts later on for something new.”

“But…” Lance said. “But…”

Pidge laughed. “You can keep this one, if you want,” she said. “A memento for your first invention.”

Lance breathed a sigh of relief, holding the invention to his chest protectively, as if Pidge would overcome her paralysis simply to pry the invention out of his grip and take it apart.

And surprisingly enough, Lance kept coming back, kept taking time out of his day to spend time inventing things with her. In the back of her mind, Pidge had doubted how serious he was about taking the time to go to her house and act as her hands, but he did it often and without complaint.

They created all sorts of useless things together, Lance getting used to her directions and even starting to learn different things himself. Sometimes he’d do something like connect a wire before Pidge had even told him to, only realizing moments after and resorting to spluttering, afraid he’d somehow managed to mess it up.

Finishing every invention was a struggle, because it tore Lance’s heart apart to undo all the work they’d done in order to create whatever they’d made in the first place. More often than not, Pidge let him argue his way out of destroying their invention, Lance always having some kind of wild explanation as to why they absolutely had to keep it.

“I think I’m ready to help you with Rover now,” Lance said preemptively, tossing his bookbag onto Pidge’s bed as he entered the room. He’d managed to convince himself that the only reason the two of them had yet to finish up Pidge’s genius robot was because Pidge was worried that he was too inexperienced. In reality, the only reason Pidge didn’t want to work on Rover was because of how disheartening it was. Even if she did manage to finish it with Lance, she still wouldn’t be able to use it in the competition, seeing as she couldn’t control it herself.

Still…

Lance looked so excited, practically beaming at the idea of getting Rover to work properly. It _would_  be pretty cool when it was done, which was probably reason enough to finish it. Pidge rolled her eyes at herself internally. It was useless to pretend that she was going to finish Rover for any reason other than to please Lance, to see him cheer with excitement when it finally lit up and took to the air.

“All right,” Pidge said. “But I’m warning you, this is gonna be a lot harder than all the other things we’ve been making together.”

“I can take it, Pidge,” Lance assured her. He wiggled his fingers in the air. “These nimble fingers can assemble anything.”

“Unfortunately, we’re gonna need a bit more brain power with this one,” Pidge said, leaning forward to get her mouth around her straw and maneuvering herself to her desk. All her pencils and journals had been removed, now replaced with screens and a holder for her mouth-stick. “I really just need to do some more calibrations before it’ll be ready.”

Lance’s face did what Pidge could only describe as a spasm. “Oh no,” he said. And then, with a full body shiver, “ _Math_.”

This made Pidge laugh (as if practically every other sentence out of Lance’s mouth didn’t make her laugh) and she jerked her head towards her bed. “You can do your physics homework,” she said. “I’ll tell you when I think I’ve got it.”

Lance agreed without reluctance, obviously not eager to try to wrap his head around anything more advanced than the physics he was already struggling with, and Pidge buried herself in her work. Surprisingly, it felt good to wrap herself in theories and equations once more. Plus, it was nice that she could do it on her own, using her mouth-stick and a keyboard to compute her problems.

The only problem was there was no way for her to work out her frustrations when her equations didn’t quite add up. She couldn’t tinker as she thought, couldn’t get up and pace, couldn’t slam her fist on her desk in frustration. She was forced to just sit there and stew as she slogged her way through her work. It was probably made especially hard by the fact that it’d been so long since she’d last done this.

Several times, Pidge called Lance back over, feeling confident in her math and calibrations and Lance’s fingers. And, each time, something was slightly off, meaning that Rover wouldn’t turn on or wouldn’t turn _off_  or started bouncing between the floor and ceiling, its hovering mechanism adjusted incorrectly. But still, they were definitely making progress, and as Pidge called Lance back over for what felt like at least the tenth time, she was feeling pretty confident.

“Ready?” Lance said, eyeing her with excitement as he prepared the press the last panel into place. Should everything be in working order, this would mean that the drone would turn on and begin hovering in the air, where it would then respond to the remote currently sitting by Lance’s foot.

“As I’ll ever be,” Pidge said, and Lance pressed the panel down.

At first, nothing. The strips along the sides remained dim, the solar mechanisms obviously doing nothing to power the robot. Pidge had just opened her mouth to let out a hearty sigh when they suddenly lit up, the robot automatically rising into the air, where it remained, hovering easily.

“Oh my God,” Pidge breathed.

“Oh my God!” Lance shouted, jumping to his feet and immediately launching into a victory dance, complete with whooping and hollering. He snatched the remote off the floor and Rover started flying around the room, following every command Lance gave it.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” Lance was saying as he directed the robot around the room. He made it circle Pidge’s head, laughing as she twisted to stare at it as it swooped around her. She realized she was laughing, then, and Lance was too, the two of them cheering as Lance controlled the robot expertly.

“I can’t believe it’s working,” Pidge muttered.

“Shut up, you’ll jinx it!” Lance said, as if he weren’t already flying the robot around the room.

Lance carefully flew the robot to a stop in midair right before his face. Then, carefully, he grabbed Pidge’s cup off the desk, setting it on top of the robot (which didn’t even dip with the added weight!), and pointed the bendy straw in Pidge’s direction.

“Open up,” Lance sing-songed, a wide grin making its way across his face.

“Oh my God,” Pidge said. “If you spill that all over me —“

“I won’t!” Lance insisted. “Come on, open up!”

Pidge, with a roll of her eyes, obliged, opening her mouth and trying to convey with her eyes alone what she would do to Lance if he managed to soak her in water. Carefully, Lance flew Rover towards her, his tongue poking out between his teeth in concentration as he did. The cup was exactly level with her mouth, and it came to a stop right before her face, letting her wrap her lips around the straw and take a successful sip of water.

Lance let out a triumphant laugh, flying Rover back away from her after she’d swallowed. Pidge was grinning too, almost unable to believe it.

“Pidge!” Lance said emphatically. “This is fucking awesome! You’re totally gonna win the competition!”

Right. The competition. It was only a week away, now. Funny, because for so long it had seemed like such a distant thing, and yet here it was, still completely unreachable for Pidge.

Lance must’ve read something from the expression on Pidge’s face, because he frowned. “Hey, what’s wrong?” he said. “You don’t seriously think you’re not gonna win, right? This is literally the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“I can’t compete,” Pidge muttered.

“What?”

“I can’t compete,” Pidge said. “The rules are very specific. If I can’t control my own robot, I can’t compete.”

Lance’s mouth had dropped open, an incredulous expression coming over his face. “Well that’s just bullshit,” he said. “I’m sure they’d make an exception,” he continued. “I mean, I doubt when they made that rule they were thinking about paralyzed people. That’s probably just to make sure people don’t cheat, or something.”

Pidge ignored him, turning her head to the side with a sigh. “It’s too late,” she said. “There’s no way they would get back to us in time if we tried to contact them now, and they’d probably just say no anyway —“

“No,” Lance said, interrupting her. Pidge turned to look at him, finding him standing there with his arms crossed, Rover floating by his head as if it were on his side of the argument as well. “Pidge, you’ve worked way too hard for this. I’m not going to let you give up this easily.”

“But there’s nothing I can do —“ Pidge tried to argue, but Lance wasn’t having that either. He was already shaking his head before he interrupted her again.

“That doesn’t sound like the Pidge I know at all,” he said firmly, glaring at her now. Who the hell glared at a paralyzed person? Like, that must’ve been a first. “Couldn’t we make it voice controlled, or something? Make it listen to basic instructions?”

Pidge opened her mouth, ready to put down her foot and argue against another useless point, except —

Well, couldn’t she? Pidge blinked, her mind trying to whirl and stutter to a stop at the same time, seeing as she was so stunned. How hadn’t she thought of that herself?! She’d been so determined to ignore the fact that she could no longer participate in something she’d been so excited for, to give up on something she loved. She hadn’t even tried to think of another solution, something that Lance had just come up with on the spot.

“I think…” Pidge said slowly, her mind racing again now, spinning at the speed of light. It would take more calculations, of course, a hell of a lot more, but it couldn’t be that difficult. They could pull some of the same technology they’d used on their first invention, and it really wouldn’t be that hard to recalibrate the mic to not just record conversations but also identify commands. Honestly… “That just might work.”

Lance, who’d looked ready to continue arguing, immediately brightened. “Really?” he asked excitedly. Pidge was smiling now. It felt as if a veil had been lifted, revealing a world of ideas that’d merely been hiding from her. If she could control Rover with her voice, there was no reason for her to have to sit out the science competition.

“Yeah,” Pidge said, her voice growing louder with confidence. “Yeah, it will. Lance! You’re a genius!”

Lance burst out laughing, his grin encompassing his whole face. “Oh, you know,” he said nonchalantly, waving a hand casually through the air. “Just in my free time. Isn’t that right, Rover?” he cooed, making Rover go rocketing around the room again with the remote. Soon enough, however, there’d be no need for a remote. Rover would move around all on its own, following whichever commands Pidge wanted…

Really, Lance was a genius. An adorable, goofy, hilarious genius. A genius who was currently trying to see if Rover could carry his entire bodyweight, oh God.

—

[11:21] Lance: hello all

[11:23] Hunk: another group chat lance??? why

[11:23] Hunk: i s2g you make a new group chat every week

[11:24] Lance: listen i have things to say i can’t help the need for group chats

[11:24] Lance: besides this one is important

[11:25} Keith: I feel like you always say that.

[11:25] Keith: And yet…

[11:25] Lance: ummmm first of all fuck you

[11:25] Lance: second of all i know where you live

[11:25] Lance: so like back the fuck off

[11:26] Hunk: wait

[11:26] Hunk: who’s this unknown number in the gc

[11:26] Lance: oh that’s pidge’s nurse friend allura

[11:26] Lance: i stole her number from pidge’s phone

[11:26] Lance: please don’t be alarmed by this random gc you find yourself in allura

[11:26] Lance: i swear we aren’t creepy randos

[11:28] Allura: well that certainly is reassuring

[11:28] Allura: what is the purpose of this group chat, again?

[11:30] Lance: oh right!!!

[11:30] Lance: i was thinking we could do something nice for pidge??? like idk surprise her or something

[11:30] Lance: i just think she’d really appreciate it

[11:30] Lance: we could do like a movie night or something

[11:31] Allura: wait omg

[11:31] Allura: are u the one that was always visiting her in the hospital

[11:31] Allura: with like the homework and shit

[11:31] Allura: and the moony eyes

[11:31] Hunk: LOLLLLL

[11:32] Lance: wtf!!!!!

[11:32] Lance: i do not have moony eyes!!!

[11:32] Hunk: you totally have moony eyes dude

[11:32] Hunk: don’t even try to deny it

[11:33] Lance: fuck u

[11:34] Keith: O.O

[11:34] Lance: what the fuck is that

[11:35] Keith: Your eyes.

[11:35] Keith: Any time you look at Pidge.

[11:35] Hunk: or talk about her

[11:35] Hunk: or think about her

[11:35] Allura: LOL

[11:36] Lance: i hate u all

[11:36] Lance: movie night CANCELLED

[11:37] Allura: no no!!! it actually sounds like a great idea

[11:37] Allura: i’d love to spend more time with pidge

[11:37] Allura: although of course we understand if you’d rather have a romantic night alone with her

[11:38] Lance: FALJDSFA SHUT UP

[11:38] Lance: just lmk when you’re all available and we can surprise her

—

“Rover,” Pidge said. At the mention of its name, Rover activated, lighting up and floating into the air. Pidge grinned, a bubble of satisfaction spreading throughout her chest. She and Lance had met up the next two days after finally getting it in working order, Lance staying late both nights in order to actually get the robot to react properly to their voice commands. But now… “Go tell Matt to unlock the front door.”

Lance had texted her saying he was at the door. They hadn’t planned on him coming over, but then again, Lance tended to just show up these days, not that Pidge at all minded. He’d seemed to memorize her PT schedule, never accidentally showing up when she wasn’t at the house, which made her feel warm and stupid inside. Still, she had expected for Lance to want to go home after having spent the last two days with her.

Rover flew off, on the way to find Matt and relay Pidge’s voice command to him. It returned to Pidge after completing its task, making Pidge smile broadly. She couldn’t deny that having Rover completed was incredibly handy. Not only was she excited to go to the science competition with it that weekend, it also proved to be incredibly useful just to have around, helping her complete menial tasks. She had to admit that what Lance had done only a few days before was genius — she’d delivered drinks of water to herself via Rover several times since then.

Pidge registered the sound of the front door opening on the floor below, followed by a cacophony of noise.That didn’t sound like just Lance...

The noise didn’t stop, turning into what sounded like a stampede as several pairs of footsteps thundered up the stairs. For a single, crazed moment, Pidge thought about how she would be completely defenseless should what was probably her friends turn out to be a group of muggers. Anyone could do anything to her, really, considering the state she was in.

“Surprise!” what was definitely Lance’s voice exclaimed, moments before the door burst opened and revealed him, standing in front of all their friends. Along with Allura…?!

“ _Aha_!” Lance cheered. “We totally got you! You thought it was just me coming but it’s everybody! We’re having a movie night!”

It was something that Pidge hadn’t even realized she’d needed. She’d seen her friends since the accident, of course. They all took turns visiting her, coming over to her house to hang out with her and talk to her and occasionally help her with whatever schoolwork she was behind on. She still didn’t feel comfortable enough to go back to school.

But even with these frequent visits, it wasn’t the same. There was an obvious barrier between them, what felt like a river they couldn’t cross. It was impossible to forget the fact that Pidge was someone that had been just as normal and regular as the rest of them. Just another friend who they hung out with after school and on the weekends, another kid who complained about school and ate too much junk food, someone who had only ever been set apart because of her age, because of how smart she was.

And now.

Now, there was much more setting her apart. Now, it was impossible to ignore that she was different, that there were a million things they’d used to do together and a million and one things they couldn’t do together now. Hang out sessions were stilted, probably because no one really had any idea what they were supposed to do together anymore. Pidge couldn’t play video games. She couldn’t go out on the town. She couldn’t do any of the normal things they had always done together.

Her friends still loved her, she knew. They still thought of her all the time, still brought her gifts and sent her funny posts on the internet and told her stories about things that’d happened at school, but it was different. Except for Lance, interacting with them was like being with them through a sheet of glass, Pidge constantly on the other side.

Not to mention the fact that, since the accident, they hadn’t hung out as a group. Pidge had never really been with anyone other than one on one, and the feeling of being in a group again, of not having to carry on the conversation herself if she didn’t want to, was incredible. She found herself unable to stop smiling, laughing as her friends talked around her, cracking jokes and talking as normally as they always had.

And Allura was there too!

She must’ve known everyone else at least a little bit by now, probably having met them all while she was caring over Pidge in the hospital. She joined into the conversation easily, acting nothing like what Pidge imagined how she herself would act if she were suddenly thrust into a group of people already familiar with each other.

That night, Pidge felt the most like a normal teenager than she had in forever. They all ended up downstairs in the living room, the TV on and the lights off and snacks abundant in every corner of the room. Everyone was amazed at the existence of Rover, which Pidge was using in order to feed herself snacks, glad to not have to ask her friends to do it for her.

“Yeah, I helped Pidge put it together, it’s no big deal,” Lance said heartily, obviously thinking it was a pretty big deal. Keith sent him a disbelieving look.

“You did not,” he said, looking at Pidge for assurance. Pidge just smiled angelically, and Keith’s eyebrows shot up, his face getting that expression it got whenever Pidge talked about her feelings for Lance. Pidge quickly looked away.

“I _did_ ,” Lance insisted. “I’m an inventor now. My hands are a vessel for Pidge’s brain.”

After a good deal of bragging, they put on the movie. They couldn’t manage to stay silent for even a minute, instead talking over it and shouting at the characters and laughing at the shitty decisions they made. At once point, Lance muted the movie, taking over and creating his own dialogue for the characters, which had everyone in stitches.

Pidge felt unbelievably, irrevocably happy, and not even being paralyzed could change that.

—

“Hey, you’re gonna be fine.”

The words flew right over Pidge’s head, slipped past her ears without bothering to try to grace her brain first. She was too stressed, too panicked to try to comprehend them.

It was the day of the competition. The day Pidge had been eagerly anticipating for months now. She’d started immediately, at first with that old robot of hers that she’d ended up changing to Rover, an entirely new invention and complete shift that literally no one would recommend in the perfecting of mechanics months. And yet here she was, months having passed, major changes having been made, and suddenly she was mere hours away from presenting her invention, from facing the panel of judges, from maybe winning the prize money.

Everyone had come with her. She hadn’t realized they would be, at first, but then everyone had started talking casually about what they were going to do at the competition, as if their attendance wasn’t something that was even in question. Matt had driven, opting to take their parent’s van in order to fit everyone in the car. Hunk had taken the front seat, leaving Pidge in the back in between Lance and Keith, her wheelchair folded up in the trunk.

The drive had been fun, easy and entertaining, though Pidge had grown quieter and quieter throughout the hour-long drive, becoming more and more anxious the closer they got to the competition. She hadn’t been able to halt her precession of panicked thoughts, suddenly sure she would choke or Rover would break or the building would catch on fire and they’d have to evacuate except the smoke would affect her sip-n-puff and she’d be trapped in the building and forgotten and —

Okay, so maybe that last one was a bit unlikely, but that was the kind of spiraling pattern her thoughts seemed to be taking. She’d almost completely shut down by the time they’d actually arrived at the competition, helped and situated into her chair by Matt. Her anxiety had only been made worse by the lack of wheelchair accessible ways into the school the competition was being held at, and afraid they were going to be late, her friends ended up just carrying her and her wheelchair up a set of stairs, which left Pidge feeling indignant and angry. Having ramps and things wasn’t something she’d ever spared much thought about when she’d been abled, but now it was something that affected her so completely that she couldn’t believe she’d been able to disregard the needs for ramps and other handicap-friendly inventions.

Now, everything was all set up, her table completed with the poster Matt had helped her create and Rover sitting dormant on the table before it. Her friends were there with her, pretty much surrounding her and her station as time ticked down towards the start of the competition. The judges would have to come around to each table, observe the inventors and their inventions and ask questions and write things down on their clipboards.

Pidge was panicking. Her thoughts were swirling, her eyes locked on something in the distance as she let what felt like a tornado tear through her head, throwing panicked half-formed thoughts and ideas towards the forefront of her mind and doing absolutely nothing to make any of this better in any way. If it were possible, her entire body would’ve been shaking with pent up energy and adrenaline. It felt particularly weird, having all this energy built up inside of her with no way to release it. She wanted to bounce her legs and tap her fingers and instead she was sitting there, stock-still, probably looking the definition of calm.

“Pidge. Piiiidge? You look terrified.”

Pidge glanced up, the words breaking through the haze of panicked thoughts and actually managing to snag her attention.

“What?” she said.

Lance was looking at her with a frown — actually, everyone was looking at her with a frown, but it was clear he was the one who’d spoken. “You have nothing to be scared about,” Lance said encouragingly. Pidge resisted the urge to scoff. That was easy for him to think, when he had a guaranteed pair of working legs should the building catch on fire and the ceiling collapse and Pidge be disqualified from the competition, just because.

“Yes, I do,” Pidge argued instead. At least this way she could get some of her thoughts out in the open. That was supposed to be good for you, right? Cathartic. “They could hate Rover. Or they could say it doesn’t count because I had help after becoming paralyzed. Or I could win and they could ask me to come up on stage except I can’t because there’s stairs and no ramp and it’d be embarrassing. Or Rover could turn out to be sentient and evil and set the building on fire and —”

“Woah,” Lance said, his eyes wide and his hands raised. He placed one on her shoulder — oh how she loved her shoulders, so good at feeling things compared to the rest of her body — and squeezed. “You’re gonna be fine. They’ll love Rover and they’re not stupid, they’ll know how to present their award to you. Also, Matt called the competition runners the other day, figuring you’d panic. All the help you had was completely legal.”

Pidge felt her mouth drop open, stunned eyes turning towards Matt, who was smiling angelically. “I know you too well,” he said, and Pidge huffed a sigh of relief, rolling her eyes at her older brother.

Just like that, a boat-load of her anxiety was shoveled into non-existence. Now it was just… performance anxiety. Presentation anxiety. The same kind she got when she had to stand at the front of the classroom and click through a powerpoint she’d put together the very night before. This anxiety, however, was a kind she could handle.

“Feel better now?” Keith asked. Pidge didn’t fail to notice the way his eyes flicked to Lance’s hand on her shoulder, his eyebrows just barely managing to not rise suggestively.

“Yeah,” Pidge admitted. “A lot better, actually. I’m kind of excited.”

“That’s the spirit!” Lance cheered, turning with his arms raised to the rest of their little group. “Our Pidgey is going to kick some ass tonight, boys.”

Hunk laughed, rolling his eyes at Lance before looking at Rover with what Pidge could only describe as a hungry look in his eyes. She knew he was itching to take it apart, to observe its inner mechanisms and dissect how it was really working. He realized he was caught, however, when he noticed Pidge glaring at him, smiling sheepishly in response.

“The science competition is about to begin,” a voice said suddenly, loud with the use of a microphone. “All non-participating persons, please leave the competition floor to observe from the designated seating section.”

Pidge sucked in a breath, looking up at her friends. “Good luck!” Lance stage whispered, ruffling her hair and laughing when Pidge tried to move her head out of his range, groaning in annoyance. Everyone else wished her encouragements as well, shooting her smiles and thumbs ups as they retreated towards the sides of the gym, where chairs were spread out in rows.

Pidge maneuvered herself back to the side of her station, waiting for the judges to get to her and trying not to start hyperventilating in the process. She’d been to tons of science competitions before, of course, and the nervousness she was feeling was familiar, but still. She’d never been paralyzed for one of these things before.

“And here we have… Katie Holt?” one of the judges said, looking down at his clipboard and then up at Pidge. His eyes seemed to widen a bit as he laid eyes on exactly who he was speaking to.

“Yes,” Pidge said. Her eyes flickered between the judges, two men and one woman. The woman smiled at her encouragingly.

“Are you ready to present your invention?” the woman asked, and Pidge smiled, relief trickling through her.

“Yes,” she said again. “This is a robot I created, Rover.” At the sound of its name, Rover activated, whirring to life and floating up into the air. The judges each gasped in surprise, their eyes lit up with excitement. Pidge recognized their expressions, the same kind she got whenever she saw a particular interesting piece of technology, something that she longed to take apart and learn from and put back together.

“I started to build it before I became paralyzed,” Pidge explained, nodding towards the robot, still hovering in place. “Without the use of my hands, I had to have the assistance of a friend to finish the final mechanisms to make it hover,” she continued. “But even afterward, I couldn’t use it, seeing as I couldn’t control the remote.” She grinned, then. “The next logical choice was to make it voice activated.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the judges grinning in excitement.

“My robot can do tons of things,” Pidge said. “It can carry up to ten times its weight, do surveillance, relay voice messages… Really, the possibilities are endless. Ever since finishing it, my life’s become just a little bit easier, which is a lot when you’re paralyzed,” she joked, and the judges all laughed, filling Pidge with warmth.

“Watch this,” Pidge said, turning her head to Rover as the judges all watched her with wide eyes. “Rover, go tell Lance to come over here. I want to introduce him to the judges.” Rover made a beep-beep sound of affirmation, before zooming off through the air, making the judges gasp in astonishment as it twisted its way between people and posters and tables effortlessly.

“That truly is amazing,” the woman said. “How is it going to get your friend?”

“It’ll relay the words I just said to him. I’ve introduced Rover to the biological rhythms of all my friends, so with a quick scan of the room it knows where to go. Also, Rover is a learning kind of tech, constantly upgrading its own information bank. At this point, I could probably direct it to ‘the judges’ and it would find you three.”

The judges were all muttering with excitement, looking absolutely ecstatic and beyond impressed. Just then, Lance strolled up, following after Rover and looking confused.

“Um,” he said, glancing between Pidge and the judges. “You wanted me…?”

“Yes!” Pidge said excitedly, smiling broadly. “This is Lance — he helped me finish Rover after the accident.”

“You helped make something extraordinary,” one of the judges murmured, reaching out to shake Lance’s hand in both of his. The other two judges shook Lance’s hand as well and he laughed nervously, his cheeks having gone a bit pink.

“All I did was learn how to turn screws and fix wires,” Lance said, grinning. “We just have this genius brain to thank,” he said, angling his thumb in Pidge’s direction. With Lance by her side, Pidge showed the judges a series of other things Rover could do as well, Lance occasionally chiming in with something like, “Oh! Make Rover do that spinning thing — you know!”

Pidge noticed that the judges lingered at her table far longer than they’d been at anyone else’s for, though she didn’t waste any energy feeling guilty over it. They finished up their presentation with Lance setting the soda fountain drink he’d been holding on top of Rover (when had he gotten that, anyway?) and instructing Rover to give Pidge a sip, which it did successfully. The judges cheered, thanked Pidge for her invention, and continued on their way throughout the tables.

The second they were gone, Lance laughed, bending down to grab Pidge’s shoulders and shake her lightly. That was one thing she loved about Lance — he wasn’t afraid to touch her, like everyone else seemed to be.

“You’re totally gonna win!” Lance exclaimed, still leaning over her and grinning so broadly it seemed to take up his entire face, made his eyes light up with excitement. “They didn’t even wanna leave your table!”

Pidge felt giddy, wishing she could bounce her legs or dance around with excitement. She settled on just laughing instead, shaking her head back and forth a bit in an effort to get some of her adrenaline out.

Lance remained with her for the rest of the waiting period, the two of them trying to calm down and talk normally, though failing whenever they saw the judges leave another table, having spent much less time at every one since Pidge’s presentation. Lance broke into little dances several times, jumping and spinning in front of Pidge as he sang, “You’re gonna win! Rover’s gonna win! You’re gonna win!”

By the time the judges took to the stage, both she and Lance were struggling to keep themselves composed. Lance came up behind her and started massaging her shoulders almost anxiously, his fingers pressing into her skin wonderfully as they sat there and tried their best to pay attention to the beginning of the judge’s speech, to their praise for everyone’s wonderful inventions today and how proud they were of everyone’s hard and dedicated work.

“That being said,” the woman judge continued — Pidge really should’ve listened earlier for their names or something, “there was one invention here today that particularly stood out to us. It shows how inventive one can really be, how you can overcome any challenge with enough genius and perseverance.” At that, Lance’s fingers dug into Pidge’s shoulders.

“Everyone, I’d like to direct your attention towards station number thirteen, where miss Katie Holt has taken first place with her robotic invention!” Applause broke out at the announcement, particularly loud whoops coming from the corner where her friends were sitting, and loudest of all was Lance behind her, applauding and laughing and — something warm pressed against her cheek, a pair of lips, but then they were gone and Lance was cheering again.

Pidge laughed, her body feeling light as air as she grinned, cameras turning towards her and flashing.

“Now, Katie,” the woman continued on the microphone. “You said your robot can carry up to ten times its weight, right?”

“Yes,” Pidge called, having to quell the excited chatter in her head in order to actually answer the judge.

“Then why don’t you send it on up here to retrieve your trophy?”

Pidge let out a laugh, and with a quick, “Rover, go to the judges and get my trophy,” it was off, zipping through the air and making everyone gasp and point at it as it went.

The judges delighted in setting the trophy on top of Rover, everyone cheering as the robot didn’t even sink through the air, and then it was flying through the air more carefully, returning to Pidge’s side. People were still clapping and cheering, and several people came over and took Pidge’s photo with Rover by her side, a few of them ushering Lance into place beside her, his hand coming to rest comfortably on her shoulder.

It was one of the best moments of Pidge’s life. She’d never felt so proud, so accomplished. In that moment, it didn’t matter that she was paralyzed, didn’t matter that she couldn’t wiggle her toes or dress herself — she was still capable, still had her mind, still had her friends.

When they all piled back into the car after the competition, lots of photos having been taken of Pidge and plenty of her competitors having come up to speak to her, to congratulate her and ask her about Rover, Pidge felt surrounded in a blanket of happiness. They blasted the music, all of them screaming the lyrics at the top of their lungs, the windows rolled down and Pidge’s hair constantly in her face. She tried not to blush as Lance’s fingers brushed carefully against her face, gathering her hair together at the back of her head and stealing one of Keith’s hair ties in order to tie it away from her face.

He smiled at her, after, his face incredibly tender and soft. Pidge smiled back, feeling warm all over and the happiest she could remember being in far too long. Lance reached over the squeezed her knee, the pressure enough to alert Pidge to its occurrence, despite the fact that she could see it too, and Pidge tried to express just how happy she felt with her face alone.

It seemed to her like Lance was wearing the very same expression.

—

It was like winning the science competition had opened a whole new set of doors for her. Pidge stopped feeling so depressed and downtrodden all the time. She stopped thinking about all the things she couldn’t do and started thinking about the things she _could_. And she faced problems in new ways, started wondering how many other machines she could build to assist her needs, how many things she could create in order to make her life easier in any way she could. And then, maybe, if they were good enough, she could sell them, too. Create things for other people in the same exact kind of boat as her.

Shiro recognized this difference in Pidge too, her newfound excitement for life, the layers of anger and resentment she’d manage to strip off herself. He commented on her happy demeanor during her next PT session, in between massaging her legs and leading her through her neck exercises.

“I won my science competition,” Pidge revealed, brimming with satisfaction and unable to hold it back. Shiro seemed just as excited as she was, building off her own emotion and multiplying it with his constantly chipper one. After that, Pidge started really looking forward to her sessions with him, viewing it not so much as a chore, a situation where she was forced to feel uncomfortable and anxious in public, but as an occasion where she got to be with someone who she was quickly coming to view as a friend.

Shiro very obviously cared for her, carrying conversation with her easily. Sometimes, he tagged along when Allura visited, always happy to see Pidge living it up happily in her own home, not to mention how interested he was in finally seeing the invention that’d won her the science competition.

The proof was on a shelf in her room, something that Pidge found herself grinning at far too often. It was a constant reminder of what she could accomplish as long as she didn’t give up, as long as she didn’t let herself become discouraged because of her handicap.

In the end, it was because of her success with the science competition that she finally decided to go back to school. Her friends were all beyond happy to hear the news, making jokes about how they wouldn’t have to take notes for her anymore, though Pidge knew they were more excited to actually have her back at school with them than they were really letting on.

When the day came for Pidge to go back to school, she wheeled down the ramp that’d been installed on her front steps and towards Keith’s car, where Keith hopped out and hurried to her side. Both Matt and her mother were watching anxiously from the porch, convinced that they should be the one doing this, but Keith had insisted.

“My car rides have been really boring without you,” Keith said. He sounded accusing, but Pidge could see the relief and happiness on his face. She wondered if he thought she’d never end up going back to school.

It was good that Keith worked out, or maybe that Pidge was so small herself, because he lifted her out of her wheelchair and into the front seat easily, folding up her wheelchair and sliding it into the back seat immediately after.

The drive to school was filled with their usual chatter and singing along to songs, though Pidge could feel the growing anxiety and nervousness underneath. She tried to distract herself with getting Keith to tell her about all the drama she’d missed out on since leaving school (“You’re seriously asking me? You know I never know what the hell anyone’s talking about.”), and by the time she got there she was feeling a mix of fierce determination and a longing to go home.

Plus, along with the entire school being present, obviously, she was going to see Lance. She’d seen him since the competition, of course, seeing as Lance had fallen into what must’ve been a habit of just showing up at Pidge’s house as often as humanely possibly, but there was definitely something… between them.

Pidge’s crush still felt unbearably strong, but she’d never expected for her feelings to be actually reciprocated, no matter what Allura said. But Lance had _kissed_  her at the competition — sure, it’d been the cheek, but didn’t that mean something?! She’d replayed the scene in her head over and over more times than she could count, basking in the joy and thrilling atmosphere of it all, of how one moment she’d been pink-cheeked with excitement and the next because she was flustered, having just been kissed on the cheek by her _crush_.

Being with Lance just felt like sitting in wait, like being in a pool of anticipation. She was constantly on her toes, just waiting for something to happen. At this point, she was sure Lance felt the same way about her, given the way he seemed to always be staring at her when she turned to look at him, how he constantly got this dopey look on his face, which he wiped away as soon as he noticed Pidge staring.

“Ready?” Keith asked, glancing over at her before getting out of the car. Pidge nodded, grinding her teeth together as she tried to prepare herself for the school day. Keith got out of the car and walked around, setting up Pidge’s wheelchair before getting Pidge herself, making sure her sip-n-puff was in place.

Pidge would’ve become breathless and exhausted, using her sip-n-puff to get all the way to the school, and without even having to ask, Keith started pushing her. Pidge ignored the stares she could feel from other people in the parking lot.

“Do you still remember your schedule?” Keith joked. “It’s been a while.”

“Very funny,” Pidge said snidely. “Of course I remember my schedule. And I’ve kept up with all my work, too!”

“I’ve been in school this whole time and even I haven’t kept up with my work,” Keith snorted.

And then, interrupting their conversation and drawing both of their attentions: “ _Wahooo Pidgey!_ ” It was Lance, coming barreling towards them, his backpack bouncing between his shoulder blades as he sprinted towards them, Hunk jogging behind him.

Lance came to a stop the hard way, meaning he barreled into Keith, kept with the momentum, and spun all the way around, planting one hand on Pidge’s shoulder and the other on the arm of her wheelchair. “You excited for school?” Lance asked breathlessly, bent over into her space. Pidge tried to silently persuade him to kiss her.

“I’m excited to get back into the swing of things,” Pidge hedged. “I think I’m gonna miss not having to sit through all the busy work, though.”

“Maybe you can get out of it,” Lance said, eyes alight. “You know, like, milk the paralysis. _Sorry Mr. Halverson, I can’t do this work today, I’m paralyzed and my mouth is tired. This mouth-stick is heavy!_ ”

“Shut up!” Pidge laughed, throwing her head back and catching a glimpse of Keith, who was smirking. Then Hunk made it to their side, his hand coming to ruffle Pidge’s hair — (“I’ll kill you, Hunk!” “Oh yeah? How?”) — and Pidge felt her spirits soaring higher and higher.

“We ready to go in?” Lance said, looking around at everybody expectantly. Everyone seemed to be in a great mood, and Pidge realized that she really _had_  missed this. She wondered if lunch was just a tad bit quieter, without her.

“Wait!” Pidge said suddenly. “Someone get Rover out of my backpack.”

“Oh hell yeah!” Lance burst out. “You brought Rover? Today’s gonna be great. Can we pull a prank on Iverson with it?”

Pidge ignored Lance, letting him get the robot out of the bag slung over the back of her wheelchair. She activated the robot, instructing it to follow her around. She wasn’t sure if she’d actually need it for anything, but it helped her feel calmer, knowing she was at least in control of something, today at school.

With that, they all continued into the building, Lance talking exuberantly, trying to fill Pidge in in all the gossip Keith hadn’t been able to — “Of course, the biggest news is that you’re paralyzed, but you knew that already.” — and the rest of them desperately triedg to keep up. Pidge found herself barely even aware of all the people casting her curious glances and pitiful looks. They hardly mattered, anyway. Not when she had all her friends with her.

Classes were… surprisingly easy. Her friends had kept her completely up to date with her work, and feeling anxious, Pidge had gone ahead and gotten a head start on the next units in most of her classes as well Set up with a desk and a laptop and her mouth-stick, Pidge didn’t have too hard of a time following along. Plus, everyone around her seemed to be on high alert, just waiting for her to ask someone for help.

Pidge was determined to not need help, though. If she needed anything that she couldn’t do with her mouth stick, she used Rover. She made it through her first two periods perfectly fine. In between her classes, when she had to move from one to the next, people cleared the path in front of her easily enough, and several of her classmates even offered to push her, which she thanked them for but refused. Her next class wasn’t too far, anyway, and she could make do with her sip-n-puff.

Still, it’d been a long time since she’d had to be concentrated and focused for so long, so after her second class she felt mentally exhausted. She was relieved when it was time for lunch, excited to have the time to just sit with her friends and chill.

She had just turned around to leave the classroom after her second block when Lance appeared in the doorway, all sunshine smiles and exuding happiness.

“Pidge!” he said. “Delivery service!”

“What? What did you bring me?” Pidge asked. His hands were empty.

“No, I’m delivering _you_ ,” Lance said. “To our other friends.” He came around Pidge and grabbed onto the back of her chair, pushing her out the door and down the hall. “Can you believe Smith actually let me out of his class early? I was just like _Um, I have to go push my poor paralyzed friend to lunch_ , and he excused me faster than he’s ever excused anyone before.”

“I’m glad my paralysis is benefiting you,” Pidge said snidely.

“Oh, tons,” Lance joked. “This is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” This made Pidge snort, which was embarrassing but she found she could hardly care, too busy laughing into her chest to think about it.

They ensconced themselves in the library as usual, Hunk and Keith catching up with them relatively quickly and setting their lunches down with excited, breathless smiles.

“I can’t believe we’re all back together again,” Hunk said reverently, grinning at everyone in excitement. “I made cookies for the occasion.”

Everyone let out cheers, gathering around closer. “Someone has to feed me my cookie!” Pidge exclaimed, and Lance pretended to perch himself on Pidge’s lap, cookie in hand.

“A cookie for you, my lady,” he said exaggeratedly. He stopped joking as he actually helped Pidge eat the cookie though, in between bites of his own.

The rest of Pidge’s lunch was a smoothie, which she had Lance set on Rover so she could eat it herself, not wanting to have to inconvenience her friends throughout the entire lunch. She felt light and excited and overwhelmingly happy, which was so amazing to feel.

The rest of the school day passed in an easy blur, more classes and Lance showing up randomly to escort her places. Apparently, he’d gotten a note from the nurse, somehow.

Lance offered to drive her home, too. Keith raised his eyebrows at Pidge, making sure she was okay with it, and she nodded.

Despite having spent so much time with Lance recently, having had Lance witness so many of the processes and ordeals she had to go through lately, he’d never actually carried her. The most he’d done was feed her snacks while they’d been working on Rover together.

It was because of this that Pidge found herself feeling vaguely embarrassed as Lance lifted her out of her wheelchair, despite the fact that he obviously didn’t mind at all. He buckled her into the front seat before folding her wheelchair into the back, coming to join her in the car afterwards. He was smiling brightly, looking beyond happy for no real reason at all.

“What are you so smiley about?” Pidge asked as Lance put the car in drive, pulling out of his parking space to begin navigating his way through the parking lot. It was always a hassle to get out, the parking lot itself designed pretty poorly, which meant that most students raced to their cars after school in an attempt to get out faster. Pidge had witnessed Lance sprinting to his car more times than she could count, and she’d even run with him a few times when she’d first started tutoring him. This had left her feeling pretty guilty as Lance had pushed her towards his car at a normal pace, keeping up a casual conversation as cars had peeled out of the parking lot around them.

“I’m just happy,” Lance said with a shrug, sparing a smile at her before looking back at the road. They were almost out of the parking lot now. “It’s good to have you back at school, is all.”

“I’m glad to be back,” Pidge sighed. “It’s nice to get back in the swing of things.”

The drive was normal, Pidge having become used to driving with Lance shortly before her accident. They sang along to the music and talked and Lance fell silent as he pulled into her driveway.

“Hey, Pidge,” he said, glancing at her before looking at his hands, clenched around the steering wheel.

“Yeah?” Pidge said quietly, sensing the serious atmosphere. Unbidden, nervousness bloomed in her chest.

“Um,” he said, his voice sounding kind of weird and wavery. And then he started speaking very fast. “I don’t know if this is like, super out of the blue or anything — and if it is you can totally just ignore everything I’m saying — but I always have a lot of fun with you and I really like you actually, in like, the romantic kind of way, and I was wondering, only if you want to, if you’d want to go on a date with me sometime maybe?” He said all of this in what Pidge was sure was one breath, and Pidge’s mouth fell open midway through when her brain caught up to what he was actually saying. She was stunned into silence, and panicking, Lance added, “It’s totally fine if you say no though, like, I get it if —”

“ _Lance_ ,” Pidge said, cutting him off. Lance fell silent, his lips pressing together as his face went bright red.

“Yeah?”

“I’d love to go on a date with you.”

Lance’s face seemed to fly through several emotions, disbelief and bewilderment and excitement, before his mouth broke out into a grin and he was laughing.

“All right!” he said, his hands still ironclad around the steering wheel. “All right! Awesome!” And then he leaned forward, faster than Pidge could say anything, and pressed a kiss against her cheek. Immediately afterward, he sat back in place, back straight and hands folded awkwardly in his lap. Pidge’s cheeks were matching his own, and she laughed.

“You realize you still have to get me out of the car, right?”

“Oh shit!” Lance said, looking at her with wide eyes. “I wanted to be able to drive away right after I did that…”

Smirking, Pidge said, “Then you can do it again. And then drive away.” Lance grinned, and he hopped out of the car, setting up her wheelchair and setting her in it gracefully, stepping away to bow at her afterwards.

“ _Please_  stop being such a huge nerd,” Pidge begged, and Lance laughed, his head thrown back.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “Also, you’re one to talk. You built a fully functioning flying robot.”

“Speaking of — Rover, follow me!”

Rover followed Pidge into the house (Lance insisting he had to roll her up the ramp of her front porch, which she actually appreciated) before he bent down, kissed her on the cheek, and straightened back up.

“I’m gonna run away now,” he said, still grinning but pink-cheeked once again.

“Of course,” Pidge said with a roll of her eyes.

“I’ll text you though,” Lance said. And then he waggled his eyebrows. “So we can plan our _date_.”

Pidge drew an unsteady breath, a fondness creeping into her bones. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen for such a gigantic nerd, or that she’d somehow managed to convince him to feel the same way. Either it was the best luck she’d ever had, or she was somehow on the same level of nerdiness.

—

[4:53] Lance: DADSLKFJAD

[4:53] Lance: YOU GUUUYYYYSSSS

[4:53] Lance: I HAVE A DATE

[4:53] Lance: WITH PIDGE!!!!!!!!!!!

[4:54] Hunk: AHHH!!!!

[4:54] Hunk: NO WAY!!!!!!!!

[4:55] Pidge: you know i’m in this group chat, right?

[4:55] Lance: fuck

[4:55] Keith: LOL

—

Preparing for her date was… anxiety inducing. The fact that she was even anxious about it was almost humorous. She’d hung out with Lance tons of times, and yet now that romantic feelings were involved, everything felt different.

The two of them didn’t hang out again before their date, letting the week pass while only seeing each other at school, instead of having Lance come over to her house afterwards. Pidge assumed it was because he was as nervous about everything as she was, and also because they didn’t know quite how to interact with each other, knowing they were going on a date together that weekend.

Come Friday, Pidge was excited and jittery about the whole thing. The school week had passed surprisingly fast, getting into the swing of things relatively easy when she had what felt like much more important matters on her mind.

Keith drove her home from school, and he came inside to help her make sure she was actually prepared for her date, even grudgingly brushing her teeth for her when she panicked and exclaimed, “What if he _kisses me_?!”

By the time Lance showed up to pick her up, Keith was long gone and Pidge’s mom was teary-eyed with excitement. She forced them to take pictures by the door before leaving, though Pidge was glaring in every single one.

“I’m sorry about her,” Pidge muttered the second they were out the door. Lance just laughed.

“I don’t mind,” he assured her. “It’s cute.”

Lance wheeled her down to the car, opening the passenger side door for her like always. “You know,” he said, “I’m really such a gentleman, aren’t I?’

“Shut the fuck up,” Pidge laughed, as Lance bent down and scooped her up, arranging her in the seat.

By the time Lance was pulling out of the driveway, Pidge was having to fight down a smile, almost unable to believe that she was here. That she was really on a date with Lance.

“So where are we going?” Pidge asked, and Lance turned to her with a smile.

“First, milkshakes,” he said, grinning at her before looking back towards the road. “Then I was thinking we could catch a movie, if you want to.”

“Sounds perfect,” Pidge said with a grin. It really did, though. For the milkshake, she’d have a straw, which was incredibly thoughtful on Lance’s part. He knew that she wouldn’t have wanted him to have to feed her all throughout dinner, as it was still a subject she was rather touchy about. And the movies… She hadn’t been there in forever. It’d be nice, an activity where she didn’t need her limbs more than anybody else did. And no one would bother spending any time staring at her either, seeing as they would have much more important things to pay attention to.

Once they arrived at a little burger joint at the end of town, one which harbored secretly delicious milkshakes, they commandeered a table and sat across from each other, Lance unable to stop grinning at Pidge.

“What?” Pidge said, having trouble stamping down on her own smile when Lance was looking at her like that.

“Nothing,” he said. He leaned down and took a sip of his milkshake, before coming back up with a shrug and grinning again. “You’re just cute.”

Pidge’s face went red as she began to stutter, trying to formulate some kind of response. Finally, she ended on, “Well you’re one to talk!” And she wasn’t actually really good at flirting, so it was no surprise that the first time she did it was more by accident than anything else.

Around them, the diner was filled with several different patrons. A couple tables from them, a family was eating together, all of them chatting quietly as they ate the wonderfully greasy food the diner provided. A kid at the table was facing Pidge, staring at her curiously as they slurped from their fast food cup.

Behind the counter, the man who’d served Lance their milkshakes was wiping down the counter with a white rag. His brow was furrowed, as if in thought, but Pidge noticed that every once in a while, he glanced up at her.

Reddening, Pidge tried to turn her gaze elsewhere, and saw what looked like another couple at a table. But Pidge was almost certain that she head one of them say, “…wonder what happened…” and she started really freaking out. Was everyone really looking at her? Thinking about her? Wondering what the hell had happened to her?

Before her accident, Pidge probably would’ve been curious to see someone in a wheelchair like her, but she wouldn’t have stared. Would have tried to not be overheard, if she’d talked about it.

Or maybe she was just being paranoid. Maybe everything felt magnified and intense and surreal all at the same time. Maybe she was imagining the old man’s glances, imagining the woman’s quiet voice whispering those words to her partner.

“Hey, you okay?”

Pidge’s head jerked up, her attention latching itself back to Lance instead of all the possibly-paying-attention-to-her patrons in the shop. _It doesn’t matter if they’re paying attention to me. It doesn’t matter if they’re paying attention to me. It doesn’t matter if they’re paying attention to me._

“What?” Pidge said, Lance’s words having already slipped out of her head, overwhelmed by her own thoughts. Her eyes darted around the room, taking in the kid, the woman, the man. Taking it in and in and in and wondering what they were all thinking of her, wondering if they were pitying her, wondering if _they_  were wondering, if they were curious as to if she’d ever get better, if she was upset, if she was actually on a _date_  with this attractive, able-bodied boy.

“I asked if you were okay,” Lance said gently, smiling at her. His eyes crinkled lightly. He was totally going to be one of those people who grew up with wrinkles all around his eyes, thanks to how much he smiled. And wasn’t that amazing? The joy you felt becoming etched so visibly into your skin? “It’s okay if you’re not,” Lance added, looking worried. “I could drive you back home. I wouldn’t be upset.”

“No, no,” Pidge said hastily, shaking her head. “I’m fine, really.”

Lance frowned at her, not looking convinced. “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Then why do you look so panicked?” He was playing with the straw of his drink, twisting it back and forth before collecting whipped cream on the end of it, as if he was going to lick it off. He didn’t though, just letting it hang in the air above his milkshake, still regarding her thoughtfully.

Pidge bit her lip. “It’s stupid,” she finally decided. She turned her head, enveloping her milkshake straw back in her mouth and taking a big sip. Lance, surprising her, reached across the table and gripped her hand, squeezing it enough that she could _tell_  it was being squeezed.

“Hey,” he said softly. He looked so genuine, so actually interested in whatever was going on in her mind, and Pidge found herself actually breaking because of it. She sighed.

“I feel like everyone’s staring at me,” she muttered. “And I know it’s stupid, but… I hate it. I hate not knowing what they’re thinking about me. I hate feeling like I can’t just exist in public without being an eyesore.”

Lance’s face seemed to zip through an avalanche of emotions, the most prominent of which being indignant.

“Pidge,” he said, practically scoffed. “You are not an eyesore. Are you kidding me?”

Pidge rolled her eyes. “I’m just… I’m tired of people looking at me.”

“If anyone’s looking our way, they’re looking at _me_ ,” Lance insisted, finally going ahead and licking the whipped cream off his straw. He missed some of it, a portion of the whipped cream ending up on the corner of his lip. Lance didn’t notice, and Pidge didn’t say anything, and so it stayed there.

“Is that so?” Pidge said sarcastically, but she could already feel her lip beginning to quirk up in anticipation of some kind of joke. Probably about how handsome he was.

“Yeah,” Lance agreed. “They’re all thinking, _‘Damn! How’d that loser get a date with that gorgeous girl?_ ’”

Pidge, instead of bursting into laughter like she was expecting, found herself flustered and unable to form words. If she could have, she probably would’ve reached across the table and smacked Lance out of sheer embarrassment.

“You can’t say things like that!” Pidge hissed, wide-eyed and hot-faced and desperately trying to drink some more of her milkshake to cool herself down.

“Why not?” Lance said, but his lip was pulled up into a smirk. He totally knew what he was doing to Pidge, and he was enjoying it.

“Because!” Pidge said, unable to think of anything better off the bat.

“Because it makes your face go all red?” Lance teased.

“Yes!” Pidge agreed, before shaking her head rapidly. “I mean — no! Shut up!”

Lance laughed, taking a victorious sip of his milkshake before holding it up, pretending to cheers Pidge. He sobered pretty quickly though, turning serious once again and eyeing Pidge with that look that always surprised her, like when he got in the zone and helped her work on her invention for hours.

“Seriously, though,” he said. “You’re not an eyesore. You’re not a burden. You’re just… wonderful. And anyone who has any brains at all can see that, all right?”

Pidge shook her head softly, unable to squish down the smile that was creeping onto her cheeks.

“You’re really cheesy, Lance McClain. You know that?”

Lance laughed. “Oh, I know that all right,” he agreed, winking at her as he lifted his milkshake to enjoy another sip, smirking around the straw. Pidge smirked back.

“You have whipped cream on your mouth,” she said. “I’d wipe it off for you, but…”

“Dammit,” Lance muttered, wiping it off with the back of his hand, his special moment officially ruined. Pidge grinned in triumph and went back to her milkshake.

By the time they’d both drank their fill, Pidge successfully returned to high spirits entirely too easily by Lance, it was time to go to the movie. Lance called a thank you behind them as they left the diner, before situating Pidge in the car as easily as if he’d already done it a thousand times by then.

The movie theater they went to had a wheelchair ramp up to the front doors and an elevator on the inside that went to the second floor, both of which were things Pidge had barely even taken into account previous to that day.

Lance bought the tickets, despite Pidge trying to insist that she could pay for her own, and then they were taking the elevator up to the second floor. Lance went and bought a large bowl of popcorn, and then they were going into the theater, and Pidge felt a moment of panic. Where were they going to sit? Was she going to have to park her wheelchair somewhere along the side and have Lance carry her to her seat? She could imagine it now, all the people staring, all the people wondering just what was wrong with her.

But when Lance pushed her in, he didn’t turn towards the stairs going up or down the rows of seats. He just pushed her straight along the strip of floor in between the rows, parking her right next to a short row of seats, which he took a seat at the end of.

“This okay?” Lance asked, glancing over at her with a tentative grin.

“It’s perfect,” Pidge said.

Lance dug into the popcorn before the movie even started, claiming the previews were part of the movie, _Pidge_ , and he didn’t forget about her either. He’d eat a handful himself, before lifting a few pieces towards Pidge’s mouth, glancing towards her with a grin what seemed like every time he did.

By the time the movie actually started, they were more than halfway through the popcorn, and Lance ended up setting it on the floor in front of her feet.

“I’ll kick it over,” he said. “At least we know you can’t.” And then he reached over and held Pidge’s hand, his thumb occasionally rubbing back and forth over the back of her hand.

It was a good movie, Pidge was sure, though she didn’t actually end up paying that much attention to it. Lance didn’t realize it, but he was entirely too distracting, what with the way he liked to rub his thumb over the back of her hand, his hand occasionally squeezing hers.

The areas where Pidge actually had good feeling were few and far in between, so the places where should _could_  feel were extra sensitive, making her revel in the ability to feel Lance’s hand on hers. She didn’t care that she missed most of the movie, though, too busy concentrating on Lance’s hand in hers for an hour and a half. And she just nodded along and hummed and smiled as Lance talked about his favorite parts, afterward, trying desperately to look like she had any idea what he was talking about.

All in all, it was a rather spectacular date.

Lance drove her home afterwards, the music playing quietly throughout the car, the both of them comfortable in a shared silence. Pidge kept catching Lance glancing at her, and she had to laugh and tell him to pay attention to the road.

By the time they got back to her house, Pidge was wishing the date wasn’t over yet. She was also wishing that she could leap out of her wheelchair and wrap her arms around Lance’s neck and kiss him silly, but alas. Sometimes the impossible really was impossible.

“I had an amazing time with you, tonight,” Lance said quietly, his tone so serious and sincere when he usually opted to be joking and sarcastic. He said this while leaning over Pidge to unbuckle her before swooping her out of the car and into his arms. Funnily enough, this was something that she was finding she really liked. It was entirely different from being in her bed or her chair. It was a whole new vantage point, for one thing, and for another she could feel the pressure of Lance’s hands on her body, and she liked knowing she was being held by him.

“So did I,” Pidge said as she was placed back into her chair. Lance fell into step behind her, wheeling her up the ramp and to the front door. But from there, he spun her around to face him.

“Can I kiss you?” he said breathlessly, sounding so earnest and hopeful that it made a blush rise to Pidge’s cheeks. She found herself nodding, unable to stop smiling as she did.

“Yeah,” she said, followed by a helpless giggle.

Lance, smiling just as big as Pidge, if not bigger, stepped off the side of the porch. For a moment, Pidge thought that was it — he’d asked, she said it was okay, and he’d decided that he’d really rather not. Or maybe he’d just fallen off and Pidge should be shouting for help, even though he was still standing and looking perfectly fine. But then he surprised her, and Pidge managed to feel stupid, which was honestly really rare for her.

Lance reached out and pulled her closer by the arms of her wheelchair, until she was sitting at the edge of the porch, now eye-level with Lance, who was standing in the bed of mulch beside it. He stepped in between her knees, and from there he grabbed her face with gentle fingers, leaning in and pressing his lips against hers.

Pidge’s breath caught in her throat, tangling up in her lungs and threatening to suffocate her. She didn’t mind; she was too busy reveling in the feeling of Lance’s lips against hers, soft and warm and perfect, pressing and pulling with just the right amount of pressure.

Pidge didn’t even realize she’d closed her eyes until Lance was pulling away and they were fluttering back open, desperate to see him in all of his just-kissed glory. His lips were pink from kissing and his eyes seemed vaguely dazed, though none of that could compete with the smile that was literally taking up his entire face.

“That was nice,” Pidge found herself saying, still breathless, and Lance laughed, still close enough that she could feel his laughter against her lips. He was close enough, in fact, for Pidge to be able to press forward just the littlest bit, capturing his lips with hers again.

Lance indulged her, one of his hands resting on her knee as he kissed and kissed and kissed her before pulling away again with one last short peck.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. All right. I’m gonna go home now, before I ask to come in and keep kissing you all night,” he said, trying to take a step back and tripping over a bush instead. He shot right back to his feet, ignoring Pidge’s giggles as he continued to trip and push his way through to the sidewalk. “Fuck! I’ll see you later, Pidge, okay?”

“Okay,” Pidge giggled, unable to hide her smile in her hands, and so it and her laughter continued to grace the evening air. “Text me when you’re home safe, okay Lance?”

“Got it!” Lance said, shooting her a thumbs up before jumping into his car, several leaves still tangled in his hair. Pidge found herself giggling every time she remembered that specific detail for the rest of the night.

—

It almost seemed laughable that Pidge, right now, had something that she’d wanted months ago. She hadn’t thought it would ever work that way, that there’d ever be a reason for the able-bodied her of the past to want something that she had now.

She’d tried to stop doing this, of course, but so much of her time was spent longing over the body she’d had, over the things she’d been able to do without even thinking about it. She’d spent hours of her life imagining what it would be like if she hadn’t gone to that party, or if she hadn’t had so much to drink, or if she hadn’t decided to try to dive into that stupid pool. She knew it was useless to let her thoughts circle and linger like that, but they still insisted on doing it far too often for her liking.

But now, she almost felt smug at the fact that, could she communicate with a version of herself from a few months ago, her past self would feel _jealous_  over the fact that she had a boyfriend. And not just any boyfriend — _Lance_.

It was funny how oblivious they’d both been to each other’s feelings, constantly misconstruing each other’s actions as nice instead of flirtatious. Now, with both of their feelings completely out in the open, Lance tried to express how much Pidge meant to him as often as possible.

[15:53] Lance <3: thinkin’ bout u

Pidge snorted as the message popped up on her screen, and she allowed her attention to slip from where her teacher was talking at the front of the class to her text messages. No teacher had yet to call her out when she was blatantly not paying attention in class. This was probably either because they felt bad reprimanding a quadriplegic or because they figured she was just doing some weird, paralyzed person thing, like taking notes with her mouth-stick when she obviously didn’t need to be taking notes.

[15:54] Pidge: shouldn’t you be paying attention?

[15:54] Lance <3: only thing i can pay attention to is u bb

[15:54] Pidge: oh my god

[15:54] Pidge: you’re such a nerd

[15:55] Pidge: are you still coming over after school?

[15:56] Lance <3: you know it!!!!

[15:56] Lance <3: see you then ;D

Pidge shook her head, letting her attention idle back towards the front of the classroom as the last of the school day inched to an end. Lance, who’d already been coming over to Pidge’s house nearly as often as possible before they’d started dating, had somehow managed to up the ante.

By the time Pidge got another text, this one not even from Lance, she gave up on paying attention altogether.. It wasn’t like she had trouble learning what was taught in school anyway, and she’d done well enough when she’d been learning at home from her text books. Given that she’d yet to seriously struggle for her grades in school, Pidge checked out of class and opened the text waiting for her on her screen.

[15:59] Keith: I take it you have a ride home?

[15:59] Pidge: yep!!! thanks though! <3

In the next minute, the bell was ringing and people were stepping out of Pidge’s way, still wary of offending her or her incredibly delicate handicapped sensibilities. Plus, Pidge figured there was probably a degree of fear involved, as people seemed not entirely sure whether Pidge would run them over or not if they failed to get out of her way. Frankly, she wasn’t too sure either. No one had yet failed to move out of her way in time.

Lance reached her before she reached the parking lot, and he fell in step behind her with his hands on the handles of her wheelchair, pushing her and giving her lungs a break. She was pretty sure she had greater lung capacity than she’d ever had before. She could probably hold her breath for a few minutes at this point, if she wanted.

“How was your last class?” Lance asked, a hand dropping onto her shoulder and squeezing lightly for a moment. Pidge smiled, a happy hum escaping her as she leaned her head against his hand.

“I don’t know,” Pidge said. “I was a bit distracted.”

“I only texted you at the end!” Lance protested, which made Pidge scoff, tipping her head back to look up at the underside of Lance’s chin. He tilted his head to look down at her as he walked, his lips curling into an automatic smile. Lance winked at her.

“You’re forgetting the part where you kept Snapchatting me at the beginning of class,” Pidge pointed out, and Lance pursed his lips.

“I’m sure I don’t recall that happening,” he said airily, before glancing up and sucking in a gasp through his nose, managing to swerve before accidentally running Pidge into a curb.

“Nice,” she said sarcastically.

“You were distracting me!” Lance protested.

At his car, Lance lifted Pidge out of her wheelchair, only to tip her dramatically in order to press a kiss to her lips. Pidge laughed against his smile, shaking hair out of her eyes when he righted her again, buckling her into the seat. He brushed the rest of her hair out of her eyes and behind her ear, pressing a quick kiss against her cheek before ducking out of the passenger side door, letting it close behind him as he tucked her wheelchair into the back.

By the time they got back to her house, Pidge was grinning with excitement, itching to get back to her room and get Lance’s hands on her latest invention. After Rover, they’d decided to try to tackle another, bigger project. It would probably take months, maybe years, and right now it was just in the brainstorming phase, the two of them just barely getting to designing prototypes, but…

Well, they just had an idea of trying to replicate Rover on a bigger scale, using similar technologies to create a hovering wheelchair. If they could accomplish that, it wouldn’t matter when Pidge tried to go somewhere without ramps. She wouldn’t need people to push her as much, her sip-n-puff needing much less sipping-n-puffing without the resistance of actual ground and friction on her wheels. Or maybe she could even make it voice activated like Rover.

If they could create this, it would be monumental. They would like, be millionaires, probably, as businesses or corporations or whatever bought her invention and sold it to the masses.

Most importantly, Pidge wanted to be able to use it herself. Ever since her accident, she’d become obsessed with control, with whatever she was able to do and manage herself. This would give her a lot of control back, and she couldn’t keep herself from itching for it.

Lance disappeared downstairs after setting Pidge up in her room, re-entering minutes later with two glasses of ice cold water, one with a green straw sticking out the top. He set her cup on top of Rover, currently hovering by the door, and Pidge pursed her lips in Lance’s direction. Lance automatically leaned in for a kiss, his hand momentarily disappearing into her hair, before he pulled back and smiled softly at her, having somehow managed not to spill his water.

“You ready to work?” Lance asked, pulling up a chair beside Pidge. And she was. She was always ready to work, always eager to try to create more than she already had. But…

“Yeah,” Pidge said. “But maybe first we can watch a movie?”

Watching movies with Lance was quickly becoming one of Pidge’s favorite past times. Lance grinned at her at the suggestion, obviously knowing how much Pidge enjoyed it. She blushed at the knowing look on his face, purposely averting her eyes.

Lance ended up lifting Pidge up out of her wheelchair, arranging the two of them comfortably on her bed before pulling her laptop onto his stomach and clicking through Netflix for a movie to watch.

Cuddling with Lance like this was phenomenal. The amount of feeling that she did have in her body, the combination of the nerves that actually worked and her ability to feel pressure in different parts of her body, meant that being able to feel Lance’s arm around her, his legs pressed against hers, was amazing.

“What do you want to watch?” Lance asked. His hand came up to press into Pidge’s hair, his fingers scratching lightly against her head.

“I don’t know,” Pidge said. At times like these, it grew more and more difficult to think. In reality she had no preference toward the movie at all, it was all simply an excuse to continue sitting next to Lance, having him touch her like this. She wanted to push her head up into his palm like a cat, but felt that might be a little bit too embarrassing so soon in their relationship. “Something long.”

Lance chuckled, the movement bouncing her head on his chest, but he found them an appropriately long movie, one that would allow Pidge to remain cuddled against his side for as long as possible. He pressed a kiss against her forehead just as the title screen loaded up.

She felt completely content, like maybe the universe hadn’t been against her all along. It just worked in mysterious ways, ever difficult to predict and understand, even for a _genius_  like herself. Pidge smirked, risking a sideways glance at Lance as she thought the word, the one he’d referred to her as so many times.

The universe wasn’t all bad, it’d certainly given her something to make up for all of the loss she’d felt. A hand to hold, a chest to rest her head on, a boy so filled with happiness and smiles that it seemed to bubble over into her whether she wanted it to or not. It was impossible to be anything but thankful when she was next to him.


End file.
